The University of Arizona Press
Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
Time: 7 p.m., CST
Where: Delaware Street Commons, 1220 Delaware St., Lawrence, KS
Poet Denise Low will read from her book, House of Grace, House of Blood, at Delaware St. Commons on March 3. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. Low has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage.
About the book:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations.
In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low’s formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing.
