Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and author
of more than thirty books, Diane Glancy has established herself as one
of the country's most versatile and prolific writers. Distinguished by
her laconic honesty, her unflinching eye, and her skillful articulation
of the commonplace, she presents Native American life-especially the
ways it intersects with nonnative culture-in all its complexity and
nuance.
In her new collection of poems, she explores the history of loss that
has marked the Cherokee community. In a voice that is as economical as
it is eloquent and as sophisticated as it is exhilarating, she
describes the loss of family, the loss of cultural heritage, and the
loss of old worlds as new ones encroach.
In one poem, a farm auction becomes an auction of culture, of heritage,
of the past. In others, ancestors meet in a twenty-four-hour
caf‚, lunch is shared with a great-grandmother who has been
traveling the universe, Christ appears as a cowboy in an apocalyptic
vision, and Clytemnestra is discovered in a snakeskin. Some of the
poems are as campy as a duck-decoy Custer in a shooting gallery. Some
glitter with dime-store glue. Others speak with the reflection of
sunlight off a stream. Sometimes the verse produces a shortstop
language on the baseline of experience.
In whatever form they take, Glancy's poems stimulate and challenge the
reader with their unfettered, unadorned, and unpretty purity. This
collection is not only a spirited ride across the Great Plains, it is
also an important addition to the literature.
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Asylum in the
Grasslands
by Diane Glancy
University of Arizona Press,
2007
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a copy
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