Full Description
It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.
From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care--belonging.
From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora's green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe'e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader's search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Editor's Note
In the time of Okvik
d g nanouk okpik
Mask of Dance
In the time of Okvik
Foist
Ninilchik
Date: Post Glacial
Little Brother and Serpent Sedna
Sinnaktuq
There and Here
Cell Block
The Pact with Sedna
Utkiavik: a Place for Hunting Owls
Oil is a People
Corpse Whale
Palpate Voices
For-the-Spirits-Who-have-Rounded-the-Bend iivaqsaat
Spirit World
Black Ice
Cathy Tagnak Rexford
Luis Gonzalez Palma Never Took a Picture Here
Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film
Inuit Print
Kinetoscope
The Negative
The Ecology of Subsistence
When Ivory Changes Color from the Oils in Your Skin
Pre-Gunpowder
Here
With a Westwind
Uncle Foot
Baleen Corset
A Caribou Skin Mask
Scripture According to Sila
Migration
Bridge Passage
What is Not Silence
A Wind Drives Over the Waters
Black Ice
Return to the Kula House
Brandy Nalani McDougall
Po
Huaka'i
Haloa Naka
Haumea
Kumuhonua
The History of This Place
The Petroglyphs at Olowalu
Lei Niho Palaoa
Emma, 1993
On Finding My Father's First Essay, San Joaquin Delta College, 1987
How I Learned to Write My Name
Ma'alaea Harbor, Father's Day
The Salt-Wind of Waihe'e
The Dream Of Kaha'ula
Turns of Light, the Story of Your Birth
Dirty Laundry
Koa and the Burning of the Kula House
Easter
Return to the Kula House
Cane Spider
Back When We Lived with Ghosts
Kukui
Waiting for the Sunrise at Haleakal?
Red Hibiscus in the Rain
Synaptic Collisions
Ho'ailona
Ka 'Olelo
Over and Over the Return, Mo'oku'auhau
Papatuanuku
Papahanaumoku
Ma'healani Perez-Wendt
Papahanaumoku
Segmented
Kalalani
Bury Our Hearts at Wal-Mart, etc.
Double Decker
We Are Not the Crime We Are the Evidence
Uprooting
Calvary At 'Anaeho'omalu
Nancy Kwan
Anna at a Crossroads
Huluhulu Bag
Kipahulu
No Steal
Maile Never Miss
Oblong Moon
Biographical Notes
