We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Poetry is a thing I cannot live well without—it is one of the ways we love ourselves best, as both readers and creators of it. I have come to count on poetry. The poetry of b: william bearhart teaches me something about my easy-to-hurt heart and this unreasonable world. When I read his poems, I feel: Yes, pain, and also love. The native body, like any brown body, deserves to be loved, is capable of loving, has in it the capacity for tenderness, desire, and pleasure in a way that literature has often denied it. In “I Cast It Away, My Body:” and the other poems in this sample of his work, bearhart leads readers to the war grounds many of us wander as we attempt to recognize our bodies and lives as beautiful, even joyful, though flawed and aching. His speaker’s tenderness—for a brother, for a father, for a people—moves into and beyond the prescribed native body until it is cast away. The people in his poems are freed into the new and ancient bodies of a dragon, the earth, a dandelion, a sunflower that is also a lion. True, bearhart’s images of darkness are as infinite as the night, as the universe even. True, also, that his images of light are equally immeasurable and unyielding, such as the net which almost hangs a psychiatric patient or the welding arc in an auto shop. Yes, darkness, bearhart’s poems say, but also and always light.
—Natalie Diaz
I Cast It Away, My Body:
after Georgia O’Keeffe’s First Drawing of Blue Lines, 1916
*The title is taken from an Ojibwe war poem
Heavy-headed Sunflower
after Dana Levin’s “Field”
Psych Ward Visitation Hour
When the night unravels this night becomes
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Diaz teaches at Arizona State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA program. Her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was an Aztec.
b: william bearhart is a direct descendent of the St Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, a graduate from the Lo Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and currently works as a poker dealer in a small Wisconsin casino when not writing or editing. His work can be found in Bloom, North American Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly among others.
Contributions from readers enable us to provide a public space, free and open, for the discussion of ideas. Join this effort – become a supporting reader today.
Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, Monthly Roundup, and event notifications.
In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission