Publisher Description

Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision--bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser's fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world--for the ineffable.

Author Biography

Kimberly Blaeser, poet, critic, essayist, and fiction writer, is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee and a member of the low residency MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-2016. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. Her collections of poetry include Apprenticed to Justice (2007), Absentee Indians and Other Poems (2002), and Trailing You (1994), which won the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award. She is also the author of a critical study on fellow White Earth writer Gerald Vizenor, entitled Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996), and editor of the anthologies Traces in Blood, Bone & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), and Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (1999). Blaeser's poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction have been widely published, and selections of her poetry have been translated into several languages including Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesian, and Hungarian. Her writing is included in more than forty anthologies and collections such as Native Voices: Honoring Indigenous Poetry from North America (2019), Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2011), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (2017), Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems (2017) and Reinventing the Enemy's Language (1997). Blaeser has performed her poetry at over 350 different venues around the globe, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Center for 21st Century Studies, the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, and the Institute on Race and Ethnicity among others. She is an editorial board member for the "American Indian Lives" series of the University of Nebraska Press, for the "Native American Series" of Michigan State University Press, and for the Indigenous Studies Journal Transmotion. Blaeser, who worked as a journalist before earning her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame is also an avid wildlife and nature photographer often exhibiting her photos, ekphrastic poetry, and a mixed-genre art form for which she invented the term "Picto-Poem." She lives in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons Township Wisconsin and spends part of each year at a water access cabin adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.

Table of Contents

CONTENTSAcknowledgments ixProem: Wellspring: Words from Water 2i. GEOGRAPHIES OF LONGINGDreams of Water Bodies/ Nibii-wiiyawan Bawaadanan 4Of Eons and Epics 5Please withhold koans and questions 8Slippage 9Cadastre, Apostle Islands 11Angles of Being 13Talking Rock 14Pica 15Winter Transfigurations 16After Taiwan 18Caption 19Words on Yearning 20ii. HUNGER FOR BALANCEOf Fractals and Pink Flowering 23This Stranger's Beauty 25Dreams of Water Bodies, Two 26BWCA Haiku 28What I Believe 29A Litany of Other 30What the Rain Remembers 32Becoming Turtle 33Tincture 34Another Intimation 35Endaso-Dagwaagin 36Manoominike-giizis 38iii. FRAYED HISTORIESA Subjectifixation Cento for Two Voices 40Of Nalusachito and the Course of Rivers 42Verse Drama One: Pagan 44Verse Drama Two: Surveyor, 1849 45Rattle 461850. Sandy Lake, Minnesota. 47Mochi, Prisoner of War 49Estate of Chief Black Kettle (1813-1868) 50Sutra, in Umber 51Summary Tabulations Descriptive of One Hundred andFifty Chippewa Indian Families on the White EarthReservation 52Ancient Hunger 53Captivity 54iv. ALCHEMY INHERITEDOn Climbing Petroglyphs 56Veteran's Day 57Fire, After Fire 58Bawaajige 59Photosynthesis 61Exit #135 62Speaking, Like Old Desire 64Fatima at the Bab el-Bahrain Souk 65Reliquary 66Regarding the Care of Homeless Children 68The Ritual of Wishing Hands 70Sting Like a Bee 72When We Sing Of Might 73The Solace of Forgotten Races 75Again the Night 76Recipe for Remembrance 77That Buffalo Hair Fedora 78v. BLACK ASH AND RESISTANCEUnlawful Assembly 81The Smallest Shaft of Light 82Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance 84This House of Words 85Mooningwanekaaning-minis 86"Because We Come From Everything" 87Tribal Mound, Earth Sutra 89Of the many ways to say: Please Stand 90Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life 91Dispersion: A Treatise 94Eloquence of Earth 95Prairie Thunder 97 Solidarity: A Cento 99Sacred Stone Camp 101vi. REFRACTIONS OF SPIRITMinobimaadizi 104A Song for Giving Back 105When Loving is the Yield 107Voices in the Desert, Bahrain 2010 108Before Pearl Square 109Shiteet, the Smallest Pearl 110Canyon on the Edge of Years 111Senbzura, Held Together by Strings 112Spirit Dogs 113Bronze Lumen 116These Small Turns of Memory 117Winter Aurora 121After Words122Envoi: Drum Song 124

Review

"Copper Yearning by Kimberly Blaeser is a poetry collection that reminds us of the wonders of the natural environment and what it means to be a human living amongst them. Equally fluent in poetic stylings and cathartic crescendos, the White Earth Anishinaabe writer immerses her readers in a world where English and Anishinaabemowin comingle, inviting us to think about the depth in bodies of water, the ache felt for those who've passed on, the necessity of protecting treaty rights against the invaders at Standing Rock, and the sweet kinship one finds in eating gas station junk food while on a long road trip. Blaeser is a multifaceted artist, and within the covers of this collection is all the evidence one needs to affirm why the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin is one of the most interesting and lyrically gifted Native poets publishing today."--Ryan Winn, Tribal College Journal, December, 2019

"Copper Yearning is a moving collection from one of the most important indigenous writers and scholars of our time. In this new work, Kimberly Blaeser creates a palimpsest of 'broken geographies, ' 'frayed histories, ' 'sacred cycles, ' 'clan relatives, ' and 'everyday survivals.' The poems, like birch bark canoes, carry us across the past and the present, across the White Earth Reservation and Bahrain, across Standing Rock and refugee routes, across English and Anishinaabemowin, across sorrow and the 'blood passage of belonging.' Reading this book will inspire you to "open the medicine pouch / of your voice" and stand firm to protect the treasured earth and its ancient waters."--Craig Santos Perez

"Writing with a profound attentiveness to the natural world and concerns for the rights and legacies of native peoples, Kimberly Blaeser's Copper Yearning is a journey that seeks to satisfy "The taste of mythology on my tongue / this cartographic hunger." The poems in this collection--environmental, documentary, philosophical--occupy the intersection of personal history and present moment in deeply insightful ways. Blaeser's work has contributed to my understanding of what American poetry is and might be, and I hope the same will be true for all who read this important new book."--Jennifer Benka, Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets and author of Pinko.

"Kimberly Blaeser's books have always been necessary reading, but Copper Yearning takes things to an entirely different level. The poems in this spectacular collection demonstrate a heightened sense of political awareness and poetic experimentation. As a reader and as a citizen I was both challenged and rewarded. Moving from local acts of resistance like Standing Rock to global concerns like Indigenous land rights, Blaeser's poems feel like they are both timely and timeless. Best of all, her poems reflect a commitment to craft commensurate with the poems' thematic ambitions. This is a collection to read and reread for a lifetime."--Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

"Copper Yearning is a marvelous kaleidoscope--a poetics that flows, as do liquid and silvers, from the elemental to the oracular 'Dreams of Water Bodies.' I love the musicality of Blaeser's lines, the sense of some invisible motion that pulses from line to line, poem to poem, a motion that is beyond time but manifests here in dynamic rhythm and form. These are poems of vivid alchemy that praise all forms of life: cartographic, geologic, animate, poetic. Blaeser travels through these forms with fervor and dexterity; each poem is a journey through immensity with its detail of this 'small magic we call earth' in all of its peculiar beauty."--Jennifer Foerster, author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather
"These exquisite poems immerse us in various worlds and generations to remind us that stories and memory shape our lives; not just that of humans, but also rocks, trees, fish, birds, frozen lakes, dense woodlands, oceans, the skies and all lifeforms. They give voice to the spirits of place, animals, and ancestors that accompany us still. "This work is beautifully wrought from the Anishinaabeg language, Western poetics, and family voices over the generations thus showing how the power of memory and stories have held us together over the centuries."--Luci Tapahonso, Inaugural Diné Nation Poet Laureate

Review Quote

"Copper Yearning is a moving collection from one of the most important indigenous writers and scholars of our time. In this new work, Kimberly Blaeser creates a palimpsest of 'broken geographies,' 'frayed histories,' 'sacred cycles,' 'clan relatives,' and 'everyday survivals.' The poems, like birch bark canoes, carry us across the past and the present, across the White Earth Reservation and Bahrain, across Standing Rock and refugee routes, across English and Anishinaabemowin, across sorrow and the 'blood passage of belonging.' Reading this book will inspire you to "open the medicine pouch / of your voice" and stand firm to protect the treasured earth and its ancient waters."--Craig Santos Perez "Writing with a profound attentiveness to the natural world and concerns for the rights and legacies of native peoples, Kimberly Blaeser's Copper Yearning is a journey that seeks to satisfy "The taste of mythology on my tongue / this cartographic hunger." The poems in this collection--environmental, documentary, philosophical--occupy the intersection of personal history and present moment in deeply insightful ways. Blaeser's work has contributed to my understanding of what American poetry is and might be, and I hope the same will be true for all who read this important new book."--Jennifer Benka, Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets and author of Pinko. "Kimberly Blaeser's books have always been necessary reading, but Copper Yearning takes things to an entirely different level. The poems in this spectacular collection demonstrate a heightened sense of political awareness and poetic experimentation. As a reader and as a citizen I was both challenged and rewarded. Moving from local acts of resistance like Standing Rock to global concerns like Indigenous land rights, Blaeser's poems feel like they are both timely and timeless. Best of all, her poems reflect a commitment to craft commensurate with the poems' thematic ambitions. This is a collection to read and reread for a lifetime."--Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry "Copper Yearning is a marvelous kaleidoscope--a poetics that flows, as do liquid and silvers, from the elemental to the oracular 'Dreams of Water Bodies.' I love the musicality of Blaeser's lines, the sense of some invisible motion that pulses from line to line, poem to poem, a motion that is beyond time but manifests here in dynamic rhythm and form. These are poems of vivid alchemy that praise all forms of life: cartographic, geologic, animate, poetic. Blaeser travels through these forms with fervor and dexterity; each poem is a journey through immensity with its detail of this 'small magic we call earth' in all of its peculiar beauty."--Jennifer Foerster, author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather "These exquisite poems immerse us in various worlds and generations to remind us that stories and memory shape our lives; not just that of humans, but also rocks, trees, fish, birds, frozen lakes, dense woodlands, oceans, the skies and all lifeforms. They give voice to the spirits of place, animals, and ancestors that accompany us still."This work is beautifully wrought from the Anishinaabeg language, Western poetics, and family voices over the generations thus showing how the power of memory and stories have held us together over the centuries."--Luci Tapahonso, Inaugural Din

Excerpt from Book

Wellspring: Words from WaterA White Earth childhood water rich and money poor.Vaporous being transformed in cycles--the alluvial stories pulled from Minnesota lakesharvested like white fish, like manoomin,like old prophecies of seed growing on water.Legends of Anishinaabeg spirit beings:cloud bearer Thunderbird who brings us rain,winter windigo like Ice Woman, or Mishibizhiiwho roars with spit and hiss of rapids--great underwater panther, you copper usto these tributaries of balance. Rills. A cosmologyof nibi. We believe our bodies thirst. Our earth.One element. Aniibiishaaboo. Tea brownwealth. Like maple sap. Amber. The liquid eye of moon.Now she turns tide, and each wedded being gyratesto the sound, its river body curving.We, women of ageless waters, endure;like each flower drinks from night,holds dew. Our bodies a libretto,saturated, an aquifer--we speak wordsfrom ancient water.Of Eons and EpicsI.We wake with arrowheads--our hands clamped around dreams,dreams of hummocky bodiesglacial names tattooedon each blue-rivered forearm.What does it mean to hungerfor shards,a glossary to story us?I tell it this way:the sculpting,the whittle-form of earth--say kettle with a hard k.Something is always taken,something left behind;it becomes you--literally.You tombolo, you esker.We are all debris--our story a remnantof what moved across us.What bounteousness!We are glacial terrain,marked pathways--myth.What does it mean for my fingers, eyes, tongue'to brim with a telling,the silk-voiced dreamof one body moving against another?II.Sometimes the story is simple:the etched back of Turtle that holds us--it asks only belief.Earthdivers one and all--sleekwater bodies surfacing,emerge to sing on holy ground.But the way they tell itwe are land animals,6humanity a paradise of aloneness:a solved mystery, a locked gardena departure--that story the walking away.The way they tell itthe flood always recedesfrom impossible watery origins.But who fixes the science of meaning?The truth is:awake and asleep we betray our small selveswander beyond borders--is water bird a metaphor?III.I tell it this way:The diving for survival(mahng, amik, nigigtogether with mink and Nanaboozho).Their feathered and furred bodies.Ours. Gathering tiny grains of copper--sand and sky's minstrel breath;Noodin whirling from four directions,until this:small magic we call earth.But feel the fire and flexing beneath us--the rumble-voiced pulse of this planet,the vibration of our tectonic bodies?Remember, we too are still motion--burning wet and storied,mythic like Turtle Island.Imagine with me metamorphic becoming,each miraculous emergence:tetrapod limbsfrom gelatinous tadpole bodies,oceans and islandsrising receding risingin their dance with volcanic force.Our lives, too, servant to the alchemyto the carving gusts of wind and water,time--and telling.7IV.Sing me again the saga of sinand separation,of humans and hierarchies;I'll sing youthe ballad of glacial bodiesof many creatures made of water and belief--the one about transformationsabout eons and epics--these sacred cycles and everyday survivals.The truth is:we amphibious, we minstrel-bornwear the spiraling path of legendson each whorled fingertip.Like the trace of time on the clay of earth--the drumlin swarms, the conical hills;we too rise new each day from sleepto storied lives--to archetypes and anthems,to the spectacular castings of destiny.Recite with me each rhapsody history or rumor--our ancient epic inked nowpigment on rock-face, carbon on parchment,memory on skin.

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