Gordon Henry

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Biographical note:  Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota. His first novel The Light People won an American Book Award and his work has appeared in numerous journal and anthologies throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713264
ISBN:  9781844713264
Author:  Gordon Henry
Title:  The Failure of Certain Charms
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-07
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This is a poetically charged work of autobiographical retrospection, speculative memory and an artistic alternative to common constructions of identity. The influences include traditional songs, ceremonial undercurrents, dream vehicles, disparate landscapes, chemical vapors, relative longings and belief in the possibility of healing again and again even after death.

Some works herein are water-source clear, some are abstract meditative breaths, some are ironic dialogues with memorial humor and some are attempts to tease characters out into the open.

This collection is held together by relatives, fragments, an undeniable belief in the creative force of even the slightest wisp of memory.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
BESHIG: THE FAILURE OF CERTAIN CHARMS
Calendar of Wasted Seasons
Sleeping In Rain
Waking on a Greyhound Going West
Outside White Earth
Shell Lake
White Earth August Again
Leaving Smoke’s
At Once You Recall the Thunder Song
Beyond the Refuge
When Names Escaped Us
The Failure of Certain Charms
NEESH: HOW SOON THE STORY GOES
Calendar of a Wasted Life
Entries Into the Autobiographical I
The First Door: I As Not I
The Second Door: I as Traveler I
Third Door: I As Alter I – An
Autobiographical Meta-Tale on Writing
Fourth Door: I As Still Open I, from Spain
The Saxophonist’s Meta-Americana Tour
October Naming
River People – The Lost Watch
Insulin Syringe Blues in the Key of Turtle Mountain
The Rumors Around Us
A Medicine Song
Jazz Tune for a Hiawatha Woman
October Minnehaha Avenue
Postmodern Rez Edge Inhalation: Paint Thinner Sublime
How Soon
NISSWAY: DIRECTIONS FROM THE SOVEREIGN OF ENTELECHY
Calendar of Wasted Seasons
Gaween – Self Portrait:
Letter to the Agency Superintendent:
November Becomes the SkyWith Suppers for the Dead
Untitled Crow Abstract
Windows Against the Rain
Letter to the School Superintendent:
Primitive Epidermal Song
Imperial Lord Woosintoon
Abstract on Imperialist Cartographics
Song for the One Called Enemy
Lost Hunter – Under Hidden Constellations
Another Academic’s Last Hope for Coyote Monologue
Simple Four Part Directions for Making Indian Lit
Repeat Smoke Smudge Rinse Repeat
Hope Returns a Lost Whistle
Directions to the Sovereign of Entelechy
NEEWIN: AFTER ZAHQUOD
Calendar of Wasted Seasons
Ahwosso – Past
Song for a SisterWho Won’t Let Go
Guessing at the Weight of Spirit
Profile of a Black River Member
Remembering Shadow:In the Art of Not Crying
Rez Edged Suicide Muse
Oshawanung Manido Equay
White Cloud Woman through a Southern Window
Sonny’s Wake 2000
White Cloud Woman at Dawn
Dodem Dream Song
Recount to a Black River Elder
Pipestone: The Best Conversations That Never Took Place
Before the Thirsty Dance
A Black River Elder Pretends
Traveling Among Strangers
Zahquod’s Land
Blue Thunder Boy Healing Song

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Excerpt from book:  

Imperial Lord Woosintoon

Even your best face has two
mouths.
One talks like a social engineer
who keeps his wallet next to his
gun, his bronze trophy wife next to
the telephone, his sons next to the sons
of boys at the anglophilia
boat club, where everyone
wants another shot at a
piece of Cuba.

The other opens for the
endless supply of demands
of pharmaceutical makers,
ingesting while speaking
rhetoric any savior
of the right would never
die for.

My advice to you
take a Cuba Libre
and a day’s dosage
of zantac and cappuccino.
Make your own
raft of rubber inner tubes
and no deposit no return plastic,
take your cell phone and
your battery operated
hand held, portable, television,
camera, network connected,
electronic, satellite fed, personal
planner;
better that than to be pushed
from the side of the boat you’ve
taken out for a party on
the Atlantic coast. Your
ambitious, offspring have been
waiting to set you adrift, waiting
for the moment
when you hit the
water, hoping as they take over
steerage, they can get
away before you drown
and before you realize salvation
was never intended, never the plan
for your own sacrifice.

Unpublished endorsement :  Even knowing, or thinking I know, where some of these poems arose, they take me to another country. Or perhaps they show me the land and people I know in another light, a dreamscape charmed by powerful songs. Not just songs and charms and dreams, though. Gordon Henry’s poems and autobiographical prose interludes defy and resist all labels. As he writes, he is not “… sun priest; trickster, nationalist, exile or anthropocentric; psycho-dramatizer, or dishwasher safe.” Still, when we read these, they will trick and mesmerize and heal and clown us toward knowing, deep blood knowing, and its humbling truths: Relatives and Home.

How can we not laugh then sob and kick this book across the room and pick it back up and kiss it and offer it smoke and let it steal our camera and give it water and make it shit outdoors and pick it up hitching and come home for its funeral and live in it like shelter?

Heid Erdrich

Unpublished endorsement :  Gordon Henry is a writer of purity, truth, and meditative steel. Yet, there is a trickster in him, always smiling a little that you must take him so seriously; the beauty and poise in his poems is equaled only by their wit and fun.

Diane Wakoski