The University of Arizona Press

“With poet Deborah Miranda, we are restless travelers dancing across rivers and chanting through forests where images, in her words, cradle our memories. Wandering through dark nights and blazing dawns, she tells stories in a ‘language of wings’ with a brilliance meant to heal. Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting is full of ancient voices telling ancient stories that remain true today. This is poetry you will keep forever.”—Ernestine Hayes (Tlingit), author of The Tao of Raven 

“Esselen language moves through English like roots move through stone. Unflinching, Miranda holds two truths at once: the ongoing reality of colonial catastrophe and the undiminished persistence of the sacred. These poems refuse the severing of body from spirit, of flesh from the sacred, of the living from their Ancestors and the unborn—and in that refusal, they restore something essential. To read them is to understand that survival is not what comes after the catastrophe. It is what someone chose to do inside it—with their body, with their tongue, with their language that refuses death.”—CMarie Fuhrman, author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return

“Deborah Miranda listens out across time, courageous, tender, passionate, exact. For her, everything is sacred, from ‘the dear motes of dust and dog dander’ to the compost bucket under the sink. Like dragonfly, she makes of her work ‘a zigzagging love letter’ and presents it to an astonished world.”—Christian McEwen, author of In Praise of Listening

“In Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting, Deborah Miranda asserts herself as a wise elder, challenging the way we think of language, land, desire, longing, and our bodies in an apocalypse. By embracing darkness as a medicine that holds the promise of renewed light, Deborah’s poetry becomes a book of cures, a celebration of transience, and a reminder that our only permanence is in our connection to the earth and each other. A mandate to see with unflinching eyes, and to love without fear, this book is a call to poetic arms, deftly exploring interior landscapes of Indigenous survival. These poems reveal a woman who loves other women, who works in memory and ephemeral blooms. With precise language and deep courage, Miranda is a writer determined to reap the promise of the compost pile’s decay.”—Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender

“Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting begins in silence—a muteness imposed by trauma and settler colonialism—‘skin a map / of secret scars,’ ‘unspoken language beneath my tongue.’ With beauty and honesty, the poems trace damage then undertake sacred world-making to reclaim voice, Indigenous language, and ancestral teachings. Miranda’s lush images of nature offer ‘wounds shaped / into song.’ Ultimately, the author invites the reader’s own transformation: ‘We are the hunger. Open your mouth.’”—Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light

“Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting is a meditative journey, a spirit song of awakening, a love hymnal of old wonders. Let it embrace you.”—Debra Magpie Earling, author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

“I cannot think of a recent book of poems where the poetic pendulum swings so elegantly, so smoothly between the personal and the political than Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting. . . . We are transported across the continent, back in time, into the body, into the earth, and out into the cosmos. Miranda’s range is astonishing, moving from the universal to the particular with equal grace. ‘Here is my heart,’ Miranda writes, ‘hung / like a bright planet in a lantern. Here / is the glass embracing that light.’ Here, indeed is a glass embracing that light. I love how this book glows.”—Dean Rader, co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous American Prose, Poetry, and Conversations

“What human acts can rend apart—mothers from children, plants from earth, language from tongue—are sutured through verse and song into wounded wholeness. Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting pulses with energy, as ghosts of trees surge through concrete, connecting root to moon: a holy text appears in a swirl of starlings, stars hang in the sky like fiery spiders, and a steady creak of cricket wings hews longing and connection across a sprawling city. This is a work of steady attention, a reconnection of ancient routes, a pouring out of healing fire.”—Beth Piatote, author of distant water: poems

“This powerful collection asks us: What is sacred? And unapologetically answers back. These poems remind us what tries to break us only makes us stronger. These poems feel loud and beautiful and necessary. Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting is storytelling, a celebration of Indigenous language and identity, of survival, of strength, and of deep love. This book is a gift.”—Sasha LaPointe, author of Thunder Song

“In the face of multiple ongoing apocalypses, Miranda’s Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting offers a luminous path to restoration. Her expansive vision holds heartbreak, desire, and fury alongside a fierce love for the human and more-than-human world. By moon song, by starlight, and by ocean glitter, Miranda asks the reader to hold the world, its spiders and compost, people and cedars, as sacred, and ‘all worth praising.’”—Annie Wenstrup, author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories

“Miranda skillfully creates poems that highlight the beauty, music, and teachings present in the natural world. The poems spiral through moments of memory and deep observation.”—Casandra López, author of Brother Bullet

“These poems are Deborah Miranda’s impassioned defense of women, children, and the natural world. Lovely, fierce, and deepened through inclusion of Indigenous language, Miranda’s poems sing like water!”—Heid E. Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic