cover image Visit Teepee Town

Visit Teepee Town

. Coffee House Press, $17.95 (372pp) ISBN 978-1-56689-084-7

You think of us only/ when your voice/ wants for roots,/ when you have sat back/ on your heels/ and become primitive,"" declares Wendy Rose in ""For the White Poets Who Would Be Indian,"" and her sardonic attitude sums up the collective tone of this uncompromising anthology. Though there have been numerous collections of Native American poetry, poets Glancy (Flutie; The Cold-and-Hunger Dance), and Nowak, editor of the journal Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and a professor at The College of St. Catherine's in Minnesota, have assembled work that goes far beyond a dreary poetics of indignation. The best of these move toward the reappropriation of Indian (including Hawai'ian) languages and modes, as in ""Tokinish"" by James Thomas Stevens/ Aronhictas: ""Call this imprint: Qunnama gsuck--the first that come in the Spring into the fresh Rivers."" Provocative essays on poetics by Greg Sarris and Gerald Vizenor are engaging and accessible, and will work well on cultural studies reading lists. The inclusion of popular writers such as Sherman Alexie and Linda Hogan will help expose an existing audience to some startling new voices, such as those of Allison Adele Hedge Coke and Lisa McCloud: ""On my initial do-it-yourself adolescent vision quest I heard the elm trees talking. `Aneeb. Aneeb. Aneeb.' They never said a thing to me in English."" (""Mixed American Pak"") These are Indians with attitude, and this collection has the potential to foster a radical reimagining of Native poetries. (June)