Weaving the Boundary

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Evocative, haunting, and ultimately hopeful, Karenne Wood’s Weaving the Boundary explores personal and collective memories and contemporary American Indian realities through lenses of human loss, desire, violence, and love.

This focused, accessible collection carries readers into a deep and intimate understanding of the natural world, the power of language, and the interconnectedness of life. Untold stories are revealed through documented events in various tribal histories, and indictments of destructive encounters between Western colonialism and Native peoples are juxtaposed with a lyric voice that gently insists on reweaving the past, honoring women and all life, creating a sovereign space for indigenous experience. Wood writes, “Nothing was discovered. Everything was already loved.”

Political yet universal, Weaving the Boundary tells of love and betrayal, loss and forgiveness. Wood intertwines important and otherwise untold stories and histories with a heightened sense of awareness of Native peoples’ issues and present realities.

Moving from elegy to evocations of hope and desire, the poems call for respect toward Mother Earth and feminine sensibility. One hears in this collection a longing to be carried deeper into the world, to return to tradition, to nature, to truth, to an innate belonging in the “weaving” of all life.

“This collection by Karenne Wood is essentially a collection of word weavings. Some of the weavings are voices from the deep history of the Americas, who surface to remind us of their names. Others rise up from the storehouse of mythic origin stories. As you read these poems, you can hear the plants growing that make the paper for the book, the materials of the weavings. Such is the power of these poems.”—Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, musician, performer, and teacher

“‘Words . . . keep faith with each other / and earth’ in Wood’s broad and illuminating new book centered on indigenous persistence along the Eastern Seaboard. Personas such as Matoaka, who the world came to know as Pocahontas, and others tell us their long-obscured truths. These poems move us through indigenous history to reveal our presence today—in an act of resistance and revelation and faith.”—Heid E. Erdrich, author of Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems

"Weaving the Boundary is a rare work of ranging significance: a lyric art that traverses the hemisphere through five centuries, inscribing the past against history, land against geography, home against wilderness, a cry against what is Not-There. It is all of what happened, not some of what some have said happened, and it is also a poetry of continuous incarnation, humming with reverence and ferocity, a poetry of calling forth both the living and the dead, aware that it is through utterance you come into being. Wood has given us a deep gift, poetry radiant with what must be said.”—Carolyn Forché, poet

The University of Arizona Press

Weaving the Boundary

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