This is a poetically charged work of autobiographical retrospection, speculative memory and an artistic alternative to common constructions of identity. The influences include traditional songs, ceremonial undercurrents, dream vehicles, disparate landscapes, chemical vapors, relative longings and belief in the possibility of healing again and again even after death.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements BESHIG: THE FAILURE OF CERTAIN CHARMS Calendar of Wasted Seasons Sleeping In Rain Waking on a Greyhound Going West Outside White Earth Shell Lake White Earth August Again Leaving Smoke's At Once You Recall the Thunder Song Beyond the Refuge When Names Escaped Us The Failure of Certain Charms NEESH: HOW SOON THE STORY GOES Calendar of a Wasted Life Entries Into the Autobiographical I The First Door: I As Not I The Second Door: I as Traveler I Third Door: I As Alter I - An Autobiographical Meta-Tale on Writing Fourth Door: I As Still Open I, from Spain The Saxophonist's Meta-Americana Tour October Naming River People - The Lost Watch Insulin Syringe Blues in the Key of Turtle Mountain The Rumors Around Us A Medicine Song Jazz Tune for a Hiawatha Woman October Minnehaha Avenue Postmodern Rez Edge Inhalation: Paint Thinner Sublime How Soon NISSWAY: DIRECTIONS FROM THE SOVEREIGN OF ENTELECHY Calendar of Wasted Seasons Gaween - Self Portrait: Letter to the Agency Superintendent: November Becomes the SkyWith Suppers for the Dead Untitled Crow Abstract Windows Against the Rain Letter to the School Superintendent: Primitive Epidermal Song Imperial Lord Woosintoon Abstract on Imperialist Cartographics Song for the One Called Enemy Lost Hunter - Under Hidden Constellations Another Academic's Last Hope for Coyote Monologue Simple Four Part Directions for Making Indian Lit Repeat Smoke Smudge Rinse Repeat Hope Returns a Lost Whistle Directions to the Sovereign of Entelechy NEEWIN: AFTER ZAHQUOD Calendar of Wasted Seasons Ahwosso - Past Song for a SisterWho Won't Let Go Guessing at the Weight of Spirit Profile of a Black River Member Remembering Shadow:In the Art of Not Crying Rez Edged Suicide Muse Oshawanung Manido Equay White Cloud Woman through a Southern Window Sonny's Wake 2000 White Cloud Woman at Dawn Dodem Dream Song Recount to a Black River Elder Pipestone: The Best Conversations That Never Took Place Before the Thirsty Dance A Black River Elder Pretends Traveling Among Strangers Zahquod's Land Blue Thunder Boy Healing Song

About the Author

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota. His first novel The Light People won an American Book Award and his work has appeared in numerous journal and anthologies throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Prizes

Even knowing, or thinking I know, where some of these poems arose, they take me to another country. Or perhaps they show me the land and people I know in another light, a dreamscape charmed by powerful songs. Not just songs and charms and dreams, though. Gordon Henry's poems and autobiographical prose interludes defy and resist all labels. As he writes, he is not "... sun priest; trickster, nationalist, exile or anthropocentric; psycho-dramatizer, or dishwasher safe." Still, when we read these, they will trick and mesmerize and heal and clown us toward knowing, deep blood knowing, and its humbling truths: Relatives and Home. How can we not laugh then sob and kick this book across the room and pick it back up and kiss it and offer it smoke and let it steal our camera and give it water and make it shit outdoors and pick it up hitching and come home for its funeral and live in it like shelter? -- Heid Erdrich Gordon Henry is a writer of purity, truth, and meditative steel. Yet, there is a trickster in him, always smiling a little that you must take him so seriously; the beauty and poise in his poems is equaled only by their wit and fun. -- Diane Wakoski