Whereas

Description

Whereas 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.

Layli Long Soldier is the author of Whereas. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In what is clearly a golden age for American poetry, Layli Long Soldier has to be out in front - one of the best collections of the century. -- Andrew McMillan [WHEREAS] reminded me what careful language can do. It made me recommit to writing . . . and made me believe again in the power of writing and the truths that it can reveal for people and what that remembering and honoring the truth can do for the individual, but also for the group, for all of us. -- Jesmyn Ward, The New York Times I was blown away by Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS--inspired by its trenchant, beautiful thinking about the relationship between political speech and literature's capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier does, with a sensibility so sure of itself that I find myself simply standing back in admiration. -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems. * The New York Times Book Review * Using elliptical prose, blank spaces, crossed-out text, and Lakota words, Long Soldier articulates both her identity and her literary undertaking. * The New Yorker * Long Soldier's movement between collective and personal makes this book intimate and urgent. She has charted new ways to write in what's left out-and not merely in the margins either. WHEREAS offers a powerful reckoning. * National Book Critics Circle Award judges' citation * Steeped in Native American history and current politics, Long Soldier's poetry is a melodious battle cry, an argument and a prayer for our nation's future. -- Morgan Parker If there's any justice in this world, Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS will galvanize readers in the same way that Claudia Rankine did with Citizen. -- Stephen Sparks Long Soldier's movement between collective and personal makes this book intimate and urgent. She has charted new ways to write in what's left out--and not merely in the margins either. WHEREAS offers a powerful reckoning. -- National Book Critics Circle Award judges' citation WHEREAS is a new offering of the deepest precedent. This gift of where as else, which no one could possibly ask for or deserve, bears and is borne by terrible and absolute testimony. Look at how we have laid waste, and how nothing in this book settles. With Long Soldier, in the interminable momentousness of her song, poetry itself is somewhere else. Maybe we can get there from there. -- Fred Moten In Whereas, we are given a substantive act of intelligent, crafted resistance. * Harvard Review * Elegant, innovative, and necessary. * Buzzfeed * I would argue this debut is as close to a masterpiece as we can get. Released now in the UK, if you only ever read one collection of poems, may it be this. -- Anthony Anaxagoro