Kirjahaku

Both homespun and sophisticated, this book of poems and family memories carries a bite: the author is an Oklahoma woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary. She writes in a language of solidarity, affirmation, and love. The story of the daughter who left home, traveled the country, and returned to do her family proud is still worth telling: add to that the heartbreak, lustiness, traditional wisdom, Okie determination, and Indian legacy of these poems and you have quite a bundle. The historic family photographs are breathtaking in their own right: beyond any job of archaeology, they speak the world they portray.

In her third poetry collection Jeanetta Calhoun Mish sends war dispatches from home. She brings her unique perspective as a rural working-class Oklahoman, a domestic-abuse survivor, and a first-generation college student to writings that range from blank-verse ode to ghazel and flash memoir to narrative free verse.