Best Native American Poetry Books
Here you will get Best Native American Poetry Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Postcolonial Love Poem
Author: by Natalie Diaz
Graywolf (March 3, 2020)
English
120 pages
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYNatalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book AwardPostcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure.
Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pagesbodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and loversbe touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
/ Let me call it, a garden. In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.
2. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry
Author: by LeAnne Howe
English
496 pages
0393356809
Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey’s “Books That Help Me Through” United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries.
Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prizewinner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Din poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.
3. I'm Rising: Determined. Confident. Powerful.
Author: by Michelle G. Stradford
Michelle Stradford
English
216 pages
Self Love Poetry that empowers you to find the inner strength to crawl, get up, walk, fly, just never give up! Powerful and inspirational self-love poems, prose, and mantras take the reader on an emotive journey of empowerment through life’s triumphs and tribulations.
This uplifting book is more than a mere collection of poetic musings. It serves as a powerful tool of self-love and personal transformation that belongs on every fierce soul’s bookshelf-or better yet, on their nightstand for their daily dose of inspiration each time they rise.
“From the very first poem to the last one… Self-love words will empower you to find the inner strength to get up, crawl, walk, and fly; just never give up.” “I’m Rising” inspires one to tap into their infinite potential so they can overcome any obstacle that appears on their unique path.
Through heartfelt storytelling, alliterative diction, and soul-awakening themes, this empathic work instills each reader with an unwavering sense of perseverance, courage, and compassion. The collection offers poems for women and men, urging us to stretch and grow to our fullest potential.
4. Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
Author: by The Library of Congress
English
240 pages
0393867919
A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the projectincluding Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among othersto offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands.
The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.
5. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems
Author: by Joy Harjo
English
160 pages
039335363X
A musical, magical, resilient volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River.
Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a “magician and a master” (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize
6. Petals of the Moon: A Poetry Collection
Author: by C Churchill
English
123 pages
057846991X
Petals of the Moon is a collection of poems that take the reader through the journey of night.
7. Dear Midnight
Author: by Zack Grey
English
85 pages
1795603178
Dear Midnight is a poetic love letter to the darkest moments. A hello to the moon. A break from the idea that love can only be found in the daylight. We are ageneration ofalmost lovers,gazing with gleaming eyesat the moon,knowing she empathizeswith our same heartsalways missing each otherby nothing morethan those few minutesthat separate darkness from daylight.
8. An American Sunrise: Poems
Author: by Joy Harjo
English
144 pages
0393358488
A nationally best-selling volume of wise, powerful poetry from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced.
From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
9. When My Brother Was an Aztec
Author: by Natalie Diaz
Copper Canyon Press
English
124 pages
“I write hungry sentences,” Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, “because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them.” This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out.
These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascialike pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones.
The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stickagainst the lion’s cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher’s mitt with fangs, the lionpulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars.
The lion didn’t want to do itHe didn’t want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowdthis: I only wanted some goddamn sleep … Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California.
10. WHEREAS: Poems
Author: by Layli Long Soldier
Graywolf Press
English
114 pages
Finalist for the National Book Award for PoetryWHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces?
Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Din, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.
From WHEREAS StatementsWHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.
11. Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land
Author: by N. Scott Momaday
English
80 pages
0063009331
“Dazzling….In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to lose.” EsquireA magnificent testament to the earth, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N.Scott Momaday.
One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. A member of the Kiowa tribe who was born and grew up on Indian reservations throughout the Southwest, Momaday has an intimate connection to the land he knows well and loves deeply.
In Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land, he reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people. When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors, I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land.
12. Life's Journey: How to Overcome Challenges of Life as Seen Through the Eyes of Faith
Author: by Ramona Otero
B096Y1ZY6Y
English
111 pages
Our journeys may be different, just as our challenges may be difficult but thank God He enables us to climb to the top of the mountain.
13. The Radiant Lives of Animals
Author: by Linda Hogan
English
160 pages
0807047929
From a celebrated Chickasaw writer, a spiritual meditation, in prose and poetry, on our relationship to the animal world, in an illustrated gift package. Concerned that human lives and the natural world are too often defined by people who are separated from the land and its inhabitants, Indigenous writer and environmentalist Linda Hogan depicts her own intense relationships with animals as an example we all can follow to heal our souls and reconnect with the spirit of the world.
From her modest forest home in Colorado, and venturing throughout the region, especially to her beloved Oklahoma, she introduces us to horses, packrats, snakes, mountain lions, elks, wolves, bees, and so many others whose presence has changed her life. In this illuminating collection of essays and poems, lightly sprinkled with elegant drawings, Hogan draws on many Native nations’ ancient stories and spiritual traditions to show us that the soul exists in those delicate places where the natural world extends into human consciousnessin the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight.
14. Wildflower Tea
Author: by C Churchill
English
123 pages
1724181610
Poetry heals the soul. A small pool of reflection in a forest of words is all it takes to escape the worries of the day. Join us for tea in the form of poetry, the wilds are waiting to heal you.
A collection of poems to soothe your soul and set free your worry. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes sad, we all need a balance so we don’t go mad. This collection of poems is brought to you by a heart that has been through the worst and bloomed again and again.
A book full of hope and magic.
15. Lines from a Mined Mind: The Words of John Trudell
Author: by John Trudell
Fulcrum Publishing
English
280 pages
Lines from a Mined Mind brings together lyrics and musings from the twenty-five-year recording career of John Trudell, an internationally acclaimed poet, musician, and leader of the American Indian Movement. More than a simple anthology, this collection goes deeper, revealing the incendiary intersection of music and activism.
16. She Had Some Horses: Poems
Author: by Joy Harjo
English
96 pages
039333421X
A new edition of the beloved volume by Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American poets. First published in 1983 and now considered a classic, She Had Some Horses is a powerful exploration of womanhood’s most intimate moments. Joy Harjo’s poems speak of women’s despair, of their imprisonment and ruin at the hands of men and society, but also of their awakenings, power, and love.
