106 pages
Published 2017
Read from August 17 to August 18
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
The first half of this collection explores how language is shaped for propaganda as well as for truth. The violence of colonialism and its empty depravities, the fragmentation of self and social bonds, the scattered bones it leaves behind, all latticed and woven into fragmentary imagery and misleading occlusions. Words are tools of empire, carelessly wielded so long as the results are the same. The American empire breaches treaties with impunity. Words, however, are also possessions of the dispossessed.
Balancing words to figure an understanding of landscape and language, Long Soldier pulls us through dizzying heights of diction, the vertigo of overlapping sounds and meaning, gaps left behind by genocide and the deliberate gutting of many cultures on behalf of the American empire. In the gaps are words too large to emerge from one throat. Grief too large to encompass condenses into loss.
“A poem about writing, bo-ring,” begins one section of “Vaporitive,” then concludes, “What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at funerals.” The next section muses, “I notice the carcass and her bark: both absent. / So I learn to write around it, the meat, in wide circles to be heard.”
The second half is a response to the cynical delivery and language of the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. To call the resolution performative would imply that anyone behind it cared enough to perform. Long Soldier’s rebuttal is astonishing, inexorable and nearly breathless, a document of a lifetime — many lifetimes — of systematic disempowerment, marginalization, partitioning. Generations of genocide and dehumanization by the colonial hordes, caught and illuminated in the language of the Resolution and in the interactions Long Soldier relates, with strangers, with family, with self, with separation. “(2) Resolutions” is as stunning a work of poetry I’ve ever encountered.
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