Copper Yearning

by Kimberly Blaeser

Overview

Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision—bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser’s fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world—for the ineffable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781513645612
Publisher:	Holy Cow! Press
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kimberly Blaeser, poet, critic, essayist, and fiction writer, is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and a member of the low residency MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-2016. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. Her collections of poetry include Apprenticed to Justice (2007), Absentee Indians and Other Poems (2002), and Trailing You (1994), which won the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award. She is also the author of a critical study on fellow White Earth writer Gerald Vizenor, entitled Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996), and editor of the anthologies Traces in Blood, Bone & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), and Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (1999). Blaeser’s poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction have been widely published, and selections of her poetry have been translated into several languages including Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesian, and Hungarian. Her writing is included in more than forty anthologies and collections such as Native Voices: Honoring Indigenous Poetry from North America (2019), Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2011), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (2017), Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems (2017) and Reinventing the Enemy's Language (1997). Blaeser has performed her poetry at over 350 different venues around the globe, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Center for 21st Century Studies, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, and the Institute on Race and Ethnicity among others. She is an editorial board member for the “American Indian Lives” series of the University of Nebraska Press, for the “Native American Series” of Michigan State UniversityPress, and for the Indigenous Studies Journal Transmotion. Blaeser, who worked as a journalist before earning her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame is also an avid wildlife and nature photographer often exhibiting her photos, ekphrastic poetry, and a mixed-genre art form for which she invented the term “Picto-Poem.” She lives in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons Township Wisconsin and spends part of each year at a water access cabin adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

Wellspring: Words from Water A White Earth childhood water rich and money poor. Vaporous being transformed in cycles— the alluvial stories pulled from Minnesota lakes harvested like white fish, like manoomin, like old prophecies of seed growing on water. Legends of Anishinaabeg spirit beings: cloud bearer Thunderbird who brings us rain, winter windigo like Ice Woman, or Mishibizhii who roars with spit and hiss of rapids— great underwater panther, you copper us to these tributaries of balance. Rills. A cosmology of nibi. We believe our bodies thirst. Our earth. One element. Aniibiishaaboo. Tea brown wealth. Like maple sap. Amber. The liquid eye of moon. Now she turns tide, and each wedded being gyrates to the sound, its river body curving. We, women of ageless waters, endure; like each flower drinks from night, holds dew. Our bodies a libretto, saturated, an aquifer—we speak words from ancient water. Of Eons and Epics I. We wake with arrowheads— our hands clamped around dreams, dreams of hummocky bodies glacial names tattooed on each blue-rivered forearm. What does it mean to hunger for shards, a glossary to story us? I tell it this way: the sculpting, the whittle-form of earth— say kettle with a hard k. Something is always taken, something left behind; it becomes you—literally. You tombolo, you esker. We are all debris— our story a remnant of what moved across us. What bounteousness! We are glacial terrain, marked pathways—myth. What does it mean for my fingers, eyes, tongue? to brim with a telling, the silk-voiced dream of one body moving against another? II. Sometimes the story is simple: the etched back of Turtle that holds us— it asks only belief. Earthdivers one and all—sleek water bodies surfacing, emerge to sing on holy ground. But the way they tell it we are land animals, 6 humanity a paradise of aloneness: a solved mystery, a locked garden a departure— that story the walking away. The way they tell it the flood always recedes from impossible watery origins. But who fixes the science of meaning? The truth is: awake and asleep we betray our small selves wander beyond borders— is water bird a metaphor? III. I tell it this way: The diving for survival (mahng, amik, nigig together with mink and Nanaboozho). Their feathered and furred bodies. Ours. Gathering tiny grains of copper— sand and sky’s minstrel breath; Noodin whirling from four directions, until this: small magic we call earth. But feel the fire and flexing beneath us— the rumble-voiced pulse of this planet, the vibration of our tectonic bodies? Remember, we too are still motion— burning wet and storied, mythic like Turtle Island. Imagine with me metamorphic becoming, each miraculous emergence: tetrapod limbs from gelatinous tadpole bodies, oceans and islands rising receding rising in their dance with volcanic force. Our lives, too, servant to the alchemy to the carving gusts of wind and water, time—and telling. 7 IV. Sing me again the saga of sin and separation, of humans and hierarchies; I’ll sing you the ballad of glacial bodies of many creatures made of water and belief— the one about transformations about eons and epics— these sacred cycles and everyday survivals. The truth is: we amphibious, we minstrel-born wear the spiraling path of legends on each whorled fingertip. Like the trace of time on the clay of earth— the drumlin swarms, the conical hills; we too rise new each day from sleep to storied lives—to archetypes and anthems, to the spectacular castings of destiny. Recite with me each rhapsody history or rumor— our ancient epic inked now pigment on rock-face, carbon on parchment, memory on skin.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Proem: Wellspring: Words from Water 2 i. GEOGRAPHIES OF LONGING Dreams of Water Bodies/ Nibii-wiiyawan Bawaadanan 4 Of Eons and Epics 5 Please withhold koans and questions 8 Slippage 9 Cadastre, Apostle Islands 11 Angles of Being 13 Talking Rock 14 Pica 15 Winter Transfigurations 16 After Taiwan 18 Caption 19 Words on Yearning 20 ii. HUNGER FOR BALANCE Of Fractals and Pink Flowering 23 This Stranger’s Beauty 25 Dreams of Water Bodies, Two 26 BWCA Haiku 28 What I Believe 29 A Litany of Other 30 What the Rain Remembers 32 Becoming Turtle 33 Tincture 34 Another Intimation 35 Endaso-Dagwaagin 36 Manoominike-giizis 38 iii. FRAYED HISTORIES A Subjectifixation Cento for Two Voices 40 Of Nalusachito and the Course of Rivers 42 Verse Drama One: Pagan 44 Verse Drama Two: Surveyor, 1849 45 Rattle 46 1850. Sandy Lake, Minnesota. 47 Mochi, Prisoner of War 49 Estate of Chief Black Kettle (1813-1868) 50 Sutra, in Umber 51 Summary Tabulations Descriptive of One Hundred and Fifty Chippewa Indian Families on the White Earth Reservation 52 Ancient Hunger 53 Captivity 54 iv. ALCHEMY INHERITED On Climbing Petroglyphs 56 Veteran’s Day 57 Fire, After Fire 58 Bawaajige 59 Photosynthesis 61 Exit #135 62 Speaking, Like Old Desire 64 Fatima at the Bab el-Bahrain Souk 65 Reliquary 66 Regarding the Care of Homeless Children 68 The Ritual of Wishing Hands 70 Sting Like a Bee 72 When We Sing Of Might 73 The Solace of Forgotten Races 75 Again the Night 76 Recipe for Remembrance 77 That Buffalo Hair Fedora 78 v. BLACK ASH AND RESISTANCE Unlawful Assembly 81 The Smallest Shaft of Light 82 Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance 84 This House of Words 85 Mooningwanekaaning-minis 86 “Because We Come From Everything” 87 Tribal Mound, Earth Sutra 89 Of the many ways to say: Please Stand 90 Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life 91 Dispersion: A Treatise 94 Eloquence of Earth 95 Prairie Thunder 97 Solidarity: A Cento 99 Sacred Stone Camp 101 vi. REFRACTIONS OF SPIRIT Minobimaadizi 104 A Song for Giving Back 105 When Loving is the Yield 107 Voices in the Desert, Bahrain 2010 108 Before Pearl Square 109 Shiteet, the Smallest Pearl 110 Canyon on the Edge of Years 111 Senbzura, Held Together by Strings 112 Spirit Dogs 113 Bronze Lumen 116 These Small Turns of Memory 117 Winter Aurora 121 After Words 122 Envoi: Drum Song 124

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Copper Yearning is a moving collection from one of the most important indigenous writers and scholars of our time. In this new work, Kimberly Blaeser creates a palimpsest of 'broken geographies,' 'frayed histories,' 'sacred cycles,' 'clan relatives,' and 'everyday survivals.' The poems, like birch bark canoes, carry us across the past and the present, across the White Earth Reservation and Bahrain, across Standing Rock and refugee routes, across English and Anishinaabemowin, across sorrow and the 'blood passage of belonging.' Reading this book will inspire you to “open the medicine pouch / of your voice” and stand firm to protect the treasured earth and its ancient waters."—Craig Santos Perez

Editorial Reviews

"Copper Yearning by Kimberly Blaeser is a poetry collection that reminds us of the wonders of the natural environment and what it means to be a human living amongst them. Equally fluent in poetic stylings and cathartic crescendos, the White Earth Anishinaabe writer immerses her readers in a world where English and Anishinaabemowin comingle, inviting us to think about the depth in bodies of water, the ache felt for those who’ve passed on, the necessity of protecting treaty rights against the invaders at Standing Rock, and the sweet kinship one finds in eating gas station junk food while on a long road trip. Blaeser is a multifaceted artist, and within the covers of this collection is all the evidence one needs to affirm why the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin is one of the most interesting and lyrically gifted Native poets publishing today."—Ryan Winn, Tribal College Journal, December, 2019

"Copper Yearning is a moving collection from one of the most important indigenous writers and scholars of our time. In this new work, Kimberly Blaeser creates a palimpsest of 'broken geographies,' 'frayed histories,' 'sacred cycles,' 'clan relatives,' and 'everyday survivals.' The poems, like birch bark canoes, carry us across the past and the present, across the White Earth Reservation and Bahrain, across Standing Rock and refugee routes, across English and Anishinaabemowin, across sorrow and the 'blood passage of belonging.' Reading this book will inspire you to “open the medicine pouch / of your voice” and stand firm to protect the treasured earth and its ancient waters."—Craig Santos Perez

"Writing with a profound attentiveness to the natural world and concerns for the rights and legacies of native peoples, Kimberly Blaeser's Copper Yearning is a journey that seeks to satisfy "The taste of mythology on my tongue / this cartographic hunger." The poems in this collection—environmental, documentary, philosophical—occupy the intersection of personal history and present moment in deeply insightful ways. Blaeser's work has contributed to my understanding of what American poetry is and might be, and I hope the same will be true for all who read this important new book."—Jennifer Benka, Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets and author of Pinko.

"Kimberly Blaeser’s books have always been necessary reading, but Copper Yearning takes things to an entirely different level. The poems in this spectacular collection demonstrate a heightened sense of political awareness and poetic experimentation. As a reader and as a citizen I was both challenged and rewarded. Moving from local acts of resistance like Standing Rock to global concerns like Indigenous land rights, Blaeser’s poems feel like they are both timely and timeless. Best of all, her poems reflect a commitment to craft commensurate with the poems' thematic ambitions. This is a collection to read and reread for a lifetime."—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

"Copper Yearning is a marvelous kaleidoscope—a poetics that flows, as do liquid and silvers, from the elemental to the oracular 'Dreams of Water Bodies.' I love the musicality of Blaeser’s lines, the sense of some invisible motion that pulses from line to line, poem to poem, a motion that is beyond time but manifests here in dynamic rhythm and form. These are poems of vivid alchemy that praise all forms of life: cartographic, geologic, animate, poetic. Blaeser travels through these forms with fervor and dexterity; each poem is a journey through immensity with its detail of this 'small magic we call earth' in all of its peculiar beauty."--Jennifer Foerster, author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather

"These exquisite poems immerse us in various worlds and generations to remind us that stories and memory shape our lives; not just that of humans, but also rocks, trees, fish, birds, frozen lakes, dense woodlands, oceans, the skies and all lifeforms. They give voice to the spirits of place, animals, and ancestors that accompany us still. "This work is beautifully wrought from the Anishinaabeg language, Western poetics, and family voices over the generations thus showing how the power of memory and stories have held us together over the centuries."—Luci Tapahonso, Inaugural Diné Nation Poet Laureate

From the Publisher