Kimberly Blaeser

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Biographical note:  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.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712816
ISBN:  9781844712816
Author:  Kimberly Blaeser
Title:  Apprenticed to Justice
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
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:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this “strange map drawn of blood and history.” It opens with intriguing glimpses of individuals—a mother “born of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,” cousins “who rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,” women “planting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabi”—and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry.

Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to the longing for the return of an MIA. The storied landscapes of the poems, the “Rocky bottom allotted land(s) / twenty-eight slow horse miles / from the village store,” also become intertwined with tribal history. And the remembered tribal accounts of scorched earth campaigns or the Trail of Tears in their turn become enmeshed with contemporary justice issues including Potlatch’s relentless clear cutting of forest lands and the strange cannibalism inherent in Sr. Inez Hilger’s study of “other” cultures like that at Blaeser’s home, White Earth Reservation. Ultimately, attention to these justice issues invoke the lives of tribal elders whose figurative “fragile houses / pegged at the corners with only hope” somehow represent and teach survival. Finally, each movement in the book connects back to the act of writing, to the poems themselves as both remembrance and a kind of revolution—“these fingers / drumming on keys.”

Table 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

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Excerpt from book:  

If I Laid Them End to End

That old guy with the muskrat soup
slurps it loudly from the ladle
Hoowah, pretty good stuff!
You shift your weight on the stool
raise the bad leg just enough
and retrieve the red bandana hankie.
Talk still spills like sunshine
over the knife-marred counter
as slowly you wipe the can
push the cloth back in your pocket
and cough down the grape pop
glancing at the bobbing black head
where it surfaced in the pot.

The burned farm. That hungry year.
The long walk from Strawberry Mountain
warmed now with the weight
of fresh butchered wiiyaas in your pack.
Mum’s baking soda biscuits mixed and cut
lined waiting in the tin pan
like our little kids’ faces at the window.
Sure took the wrinkle out of our bellies that night.

One opening day when those two old fishermen
ended up dunked clinging to the canoe.
The hunt for diamond willow,
beaver camp on Easter weekend,
the whitefish feeding on wax worms,
the string of crappies slipped from your hand,
the missing outhouse floor,
training waaboose,
feeding the least weasel,
tales from working on the ships,
from boiling sap, planting trees, pounding, carving,
and then the cigar box memories
of those old time Indians
who could really tell stories …

Unpublished endorsement :  The poems in Apprenticed to Justice are a sublime combinaton of literary indulgences echoing booted feet on still frozen ground, turtle rattles, a flushing of cranes, or antler dangles near ears. Sweet maple sap and hazelnut eyes. Gelatin tadpoles and bullrush psalms. These poems bring the snowblind tumbling into dimension. Northern lights and doppelgangers. Excrement and cleansing. They warm valleys with buttercups; recite names invoking reason. They shoot meaning into madness with the subtle elegance of Anishinaabe style. Kim Blaeser is a knock-out poet, bringing boxers to steal hearts, floured fists to punch dough, and a serious sense of familial White Earth beauty, hunger, and humility that’s impossible to put down. Voles scuttle where crooked knuckles clench our very souls. This is an impressive and accomplished collection of poetic delivery we can truly feast upon. A necessary full copper voice. A balance in the tilt of the world.

Allison Hedge Coke

Unpublished endorsement :  This is a gorgeous book. It’s musical and strange. I have already spent much time with Kim Blaeser’s new poems and I will keep reading them in the years to come.

Sherman Alexie

Unpublished endorsement :  These poems are alive to every nuance of possibility in the natural world, every subtlety of connection between human beings and their environment. What makes the poems so powerful is not just the exactness of each detail, but the shimmering around the edges of things evoked, the “third form between,” the element that just eludes the eye.

Blaeser bears witness to the fleeting and mutable — ‘tadpole becoming frog, snowman in the process of thaw’ — but also to a strong and certain knowledge gained by lifelong ‘apprenticeship’, a knowledge earthed in silence as much as in language: ‘Not meaning / but almost, / not saying, / but the breath before.’

Blaeser shares … a unique vision that is at once personal and interwoven with the communal, the historical. There is humour here, as well as serious critique … This is a sure-handed work of impressive maturity and beauty.

Tracy Ryan