The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 7 p.m., PST
Where: Bird & Beckett, 653 Chenery Street, San Francisco
Poet Denise Low will read from her book, House of Grace, House of Blood: Poems, and Kimberly Blaeser will read from her book, Ancient Light, at San Francisco’s at Bird & Beckett. Poet Kim Shuck will also read from her work. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.
This in-person event is free and open to the public.
About House of Grace, House of Blood:
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.
About Ancient Light:
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
