A Radiant Curve

Poems and Stories

Luci Tapahonso (Author)
Paperback ($19.95), Ebook ($19.95) Buy
In this sixth collection of stories and verse, award-winning writer Luci Tapahonso finds sacredness in everyday life. Viewing a sunset in a desert sky, listening to her granddaughter recount how she spent her day, or visiting her mother after her father's passing, she finds traces of her own memories, along with echoes of the voices of her Navajo ancestors. The collection also includes an audio CD of the author reading aloud and her voice is warm and inviting, like the “simmering soup and blue corn meal” of her childhood.

These engaging words draw us into a workaday world that, magically but never surprisingly, has room for the Diyin Dine’é (the Holy People), Old Salt Woman, and Dawn Boy. When she describes her grandson’s First Laugh Ceremony—explaining that it was originally performed for White Shell Girl, who grew up to be Changing Woman—her account enriches us and we long to hear more. Tapahonso weaves the Navajo language into her work like she weaves “the first four rows of black yarn” into a rug she is making “for my little grandson, who inherited my father’s name: Hastiin Tsétah Naaki Bísóí.”

As readers, we find that we too are surrounded by silent comfort, held lovingly in the confident hands of an accomplished writer who has a great deal to tell us about life.

Listen to author Luci Tapahonso read from A Radiant Curve:

"Tapahonso’s newest poetry collection, A Radiant Curve, confirms her place near the top of any list in American literature."—Studies in American Indian Literatures

"Tapahonso celebrates the everyday acts, rituals, and stories that draw people together across the years and across the distances of cultural dispersion."—Library Journal
A Radiant Curve
128 Pages 6 x 8.25 x 0.6
Published: October 2008Paperback ISBN: 9780816527090
Published: February 2022Ebook ISBN: 9780816547951

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