Palominos Near Tuba City: New & Selected Poems

This slim volume of new and previously published poems from Anishinabe poet Sweet (Songs for Discharming) displays her wisdom and long-honed storytelling craft in clear, concise, and direct works. Whether addressing the monumental or mundane, Sweet demonstrates a keen ability to get to the heart of an issue and cast the rest aside; hers are “Songs deep with memory,/ echoing through the chambers/ of every heart while marble halls/ and statues collapse into dust.” Among the figures that populate the collection are roadside vendors outside of Taos, cops in an English composition class, a seven-year old “taken away in handcuffs,” Lakota water protectors, and a mother and daughter who glimpse in each other generationally disparate visions of female strength. Elsewhere, these poems record encounters with absence, whether personal, as in “a child twisting/ gently from your hand, then/ gone before you know it”; civilizational, as in “The Lost Maya,” an indigenous woman who feels out of place while visiting Mexico; or planetary, as when “at the top of the world/ sheets of ice tumble/ into Arctic waters/ while plankton/ crazed with/ hunger,/ stop.” Such are the stakes of Sweet’s poetry, an urgent “call out to the 500 nations/ that reside on this continent,/ those like me who want more than this.” (May)