Kirjahaku

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota. The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.

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.

Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this “strange map drawn of blood and history.” It opens with intriguing glimpses of individuals—a mother “born of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,” cousins “who rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,” women “planting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabi”—and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry. Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to the longing for the return of an MIA. The storied landscapes of the poems, the “Rocky bottom allotted land(s) / twenty-eight slow horse miles / from the village store,” also become intertwined with tribal history. And the remembered tribal accounts of scorched earth campaigns or the Trail of Tears in their turn become enmeshed with contemporary justice issues including Potlatch’s relentless clear cutting of forest lands and the strange cannibalism inherent in Sr. Inez Hilger’s study of “other” cultures like that at Blaeser’s home, White Earth Reservation. Ultimately, attention to these justice issues invoke the lives of tribal elders whose figurative “fragile houses / pegged at the corners with only hope” somehow represent and teach survival. Finally, each movement in the book connects back to the act of writing, to the poems themselves as both remembrance and a kind of revolution—“these fingers / drumming on keys.”