The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, October 19, 2024
Time: 7 p.m., EST
Where: Union Market, 1324 4th St. NE, Washington, D.C.
Poet Denise Low will read from for her book House of Grace, House of Blood, for the Poetry Night Panel at Politics and Prose at Union Market on Saturday, October 19. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. She will be joining other poets including Christian Teresi and Jason Schneiderman. Books will be available for purchase and signing; the event is free with first come, first serve seating.
About the book:
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, 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.
