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Through detailed images of ancestors and wilderness places, through renderings of story, tribal history, and family ritual, award-winning Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser explores our mesh of tangled origins. Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of 21st century Native America.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- I. THE TURN WE TAKE
- Family Tree
- Shadow Sisters
- A Boxer Grandfather
- Mashkawapide
- Jingles You Made
- The Womanless Wedding
- The More I Learn of Men's Plumbing
- MIA, Foreign and Domestic
- II. THAT WHICH REFUSES PRETENTION
- Cranes flushed from a field
- Some Kind of Likeness
- The Spirit of Matter
- grace of crossings
- Somewhere on the Verge
- Two Oak Stories
- Gelatin tadpoles
- Boundaries
- Memories of Rock
- Listing Ecstatic
- Drawing Breath
- Seasonal: Blue Winter, Kirkenes Fire
- Rain-soaked snowman's scarf
- Wild turkeys at field gate
- House Work
- 20 September
- Ooh...Ahh!
- Haiku Journey
- Northern follows jig
- III. TO TRAVEL WITH YOU
- Of Wind and Trees
- Fingers paused on keyboard
- Told at Beartooth in July
- Sun through window slats
- Something Deep Like Copper
- If I Laid Them End to End
- Indian in Search of an Entourage
- Bizaan
- Page Proofs
- Goodbye to All That
- Railroad Song
- Stories of Fire
- This Dance
- IV. . . . IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVERY WAR
- Red Lake 70
- Housing Conditions of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Families
- Dictionary for a New Century
- The Things I Know
- Who Talks Politics
- Fantasies of Women
- V. GONE. OR GONE ON. AGAIN
- What They Did by Lamplight
- Refractions
- Crunch of booted feet
- Resisting Shape or Language
- Weavings For Cousins Who Died Too Young
- July 29, 2002
- Apprenticed to Justice
About the author
Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing. Her publications include two books of poetry Trailing You, winner of the first book award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and Absentee Indians and Other Poems, as well as a scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, Blaeser is also the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Her most recent critical publication is a 100-page essay on Native poetry, "Cannons and Canonization," in The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States. Kim lives with her husband and two young children in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons township Wisconsin.
