Effigies II

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Creek, Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, Irish, English, and Scot ascendants. Raised in North Carolina, the Plains and Canada, she previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories. A fellow of the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Black Earth Institute (emeritus), Salon Ada, and The Center for Great Plains Institute.

These five first books join to represent a freshly emerging 21st Century Indigenous Mainland poetry. This collection releases a reader into parallel spaces of Native culture as diverse as the US-occupied landscapes they embody; the desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes Region, Kansas and Oklahoma, bringing a bit of urban and rural symphony by resisting folds into Americana with courageous unfolding imagery in a serious range of departure. Five debut books present a fistful of furious nature, supple with beauty and brilliance and packing the punch intentional poetry delivers. This is a fearless collection of evocative and challenging verse. Effigies II is a road trip through Indian Country with five American Indian women poets who bring it all back home.

"I want my ink to bellow," Shawnee poet Laura Da' writes, and in Effigies II, series editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has gathered ink that bellows-and soothes and whispers and rants and hums and moans and rocks. In this gathering of "survivors who remember / where they come from," we find beautifully-built poems in many kinds of language, from "mad-house logic" to "the language of the deer," from "the subtle semantics of Shawnee" to a La Bajada love song. These poems travel the world from Nanih Waiya to Sacre-Coeur, from the brutal world of the twelve Caesars of ancient Rome to Caesar's Palace, from The Inari Temple to kitchi kabekong, from Peer Gynt to Buck Owens, from the world of two women firing a Ruger 270 at beer cans in the headlights to "the woods, the remote quiet in the deep of them." Good editing (like good mothering), as Hedge Coke casually defines it in her introduction, is "reveling in what they bring bursting in." Readers, the door just banged open. Prepare to revel. -- Jon Davis, author of Preliminary Report and Scrimmage of Appetite From within the pages of Effigies II the essential aspect of light from our indgenous poetics burns brilliant. Lara Mann's impeccable & evocative poems give rise to Davila's ironic modernities, Menominee's archetypal homages, Leora's prescient renderings of the seventh-generation's silhouettes, and finally, the magnificently weighted lines of Laura Da'. -- Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, Hyperboreal, and Then the World Was Milk These poems, fresh effigies carved by five young Native women cracked open my heart. Read them when alone carefully swaddled in a warm blanket, or read them aloud at the kitchen table to all your relations, past and future. But read them. Glorious, rich with imagery, potent to the last page! -- LeAnne Howe, author of Evidence of Red and Choctalking on Other Realities Allison Hedge Coke has done it again, with her keen ear and eye: brought powerful new Native women's voices to our attention. Rigorous, powerful, brave, haunting, spirited. These collections are a refreshing antidote to any old cynical poetry tropes. Cheers all around. -- Anne Waldman, author of The Iovis Trilogy, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur In Effigies II we are introduced to a subtle and striking set of new indigenous voices. The five poets represented here give readers a window into the nuanced range of contemporary Native poetry and the complex polyphonic lives that work to (re)define a contemporary indigenous identity. Each of these poets establishes themselves in a defiant domain of fluidity, unwilling to settle for staid and hardened definitions of indigeneity. -- Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone

Acknowledgements Editor's Note LAURA DA' The Tecumseh Motel UNGELBAH DAVILA Outlaw Neon KRISTI LEORA Dark Swimming LARA MANN A Song of Ascents and Descents KATERI MENOMINEE In Tongues Biographical Notes