Heid E. Erdrich

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Biographical note:  Heid E. Erdrich, author of Fishing for Myth poems from New Rivers Press and co-editor of Sister Nations anthology from the Minnesota Historical Society Press, has won awards from The Loft Literary Center, Minnesota State Arts Board, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, and the Archibald Bush Foundation. She founded Birchbark Books Press with her sister, author Louise Erdrich. Her degrees are from Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins University. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, she was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. She teaches at The University of St. Thomas.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710607
ISBN-10:  1844710602
ISBN-13:  9781844710607
Author:  Heid E. Erdrich
Title:  The Mother’s Tongue
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Apr-05
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  SHORTLISTED FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS 2006. Poems in The Mother’s Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both native and non-native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body — of womanhood and motherhood — through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language — of recovered Ojibwe language and English renewed as first language in the mouths of infants. These are poems that urge women to discover the power of their own tongues as they teach speech — the sweet, salty, sour and bitter desires — the taste on the mother’s tongue.

Table of contents:
Offering: Words
1 Honey Sweet
Craving Honey
The Way To
She Dances
The Hive Improvisation
Weeds in Grief
Intimate Detail
The Way To Have No Child
Stung
The Way To Be Convinced
This Body, The River
Neon Lovers, Another Painting
For Her Sake
The Red Toad
Oyster Mother
Amazon Huntress Gives Birth to Twins
With Honey from the Rock Would I Satisfy You
Woman’s Work
Pica
The Deep
2 Salt Lick
Craving, First Month
Offering: The Child
When I Go Down to Pray
Kookum
First Rice
Idol Construction
The Girl in Geography Class
Advice
The Bee Kept Wife
Cat Woman
Parade of Old Loves
What Pregnant is Like
Young Poets with Roman Noses
Wedding Blessing
Nesting Dolls
Craving, Seventh Month
Another Touch
3 Milk Sour
Offering: The Breasts
Craving Release
Sisters Stay On the Other Side
Image
After Image
After Birth
Postpartum I
Postpartum II
Postpartum III
Postpartum IV
Postpartum V
New Born
Look
Breasts
Twelve Items or Less, 1999
Popular Parenting
4 Bitter Root
Offering: Ojibwe
Craving: Bitter Root
Twin Bugs
Vermillion Hands Petroglyph
Our Words Are Not Our Own
Poem for Our Ojibwe Names
They All Dream the Lake, Again
In the Belly
Mother of Sorrows
Summer of Infanticides
Last Snow
Changeling
Elemental Conception
Maternal Desire
1 a.m. Turtle Pool
Remedy
Wiisah kote: The Burnt Wood People
Mindimoyeg: Dandelions
Old Man’s Tale
Basswood
Husbandry
The Good Woman
The Only Child
Motherhood as First Language

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Excerpt from book:  

Parade of Old Loves

Every night a different one returns:
his hair loopy curls or shorn
to velvet or in lanks or shiny bald,
he comes to me real as ever.
And I am utterly convinced each one
is the one who put this baby in me.
I take it as a retrospective show:
How things might have been —
This one's flat black eyes
on me again and me the same woman
I was once — as cold as he was hard.
I'm only waiting now to dream the one
I was all earth and warm for,
the one I lost with my belief.
I'll take this as my chance to retrieve
each part of me I loaned.
Come on guys, sure I'll say the baby's yours,
I'll make it bouncy, shining, golden just for you —
if only you bring it back, bring it all back,
so when I give this time, my gift is whole.

Unpublished endorsement :  Funny sexy, rowdy, and surprising, these poems pretty much cover the entire human existence, but I especially like the poems about the Honey-bun delivery vans, post-partum blues, and justified hatred of wind-up toy makers. How can you not love a hate poem about wind-up toy makers? What kind of crazy person writes a hate poem about wind-up toy makers? Heid is exactly that kind of poet. She is original. Buy this book now.

Sherman Alexie

Unpublished endorsement :  With The Mother's Tongue Heid Erdrich has come into her creative power. The poems are a powerful treatise on the transformative state of mothering. These lines at the heart of the collection will haunt anyone who has held a son in her arms in rough political times:


“I have fed my son on sorrow,/I have made him food for war.”

Joy Harjo

Unpublished endorsement :  Heid’s poetry is a perfect fusion of music and painting, power and subtlety, emotion and intelligence. She takes us to a new world.

Wang Ping