Molly McGlennen

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Biographical note:  Molly McGlennen was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College. McGlennen’s poetry and scholarship is widely anthologized. Simon Ortiz calls Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits “food for our struggle and food for our victory as Indigenous people.”

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718320
ISBN:  9781844718320
Author:  Molly McGlennen
Title:  Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Nov-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Calling upon the personal memories and ancestral antecedents of her Anishinaabe family heritage, Molly McGlennen writes poems for Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits that render the continuance and celebration of the complex realities of Native American life in the 21st century. McGlennen’s collection of finely rendered lyrical and narrative pieces recounts the story of physical and spiritual nourishment, as the poet begins by telling her readers that her poems, like family recipes, are best served aloud.

Main description:  Calling upon the personal memories and ancestral antecedents of her Anishinaabe family heritage, Molly McGlennen writes poems for Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits that render the continuance and celebration of the complex realities of Native American life in the 21st century. The collection of finely rendered lyrical and narrative pieces recounts the story of physical and spiritual nourishment, as the poet begins by telling her readers that her poems, like family recipes, are best served aloud, shared as gifts, and regarded as pieces of gratitude to be given away. Telling us how “memories flesh her fully,” McGlennen paints an intricate but compassionate picture of growing up “away from the lakes that have always fed her family,” and of urban life where she and the neighbor kids shoot hoops in alleyways and “fall asleep in the backs of old cars.” Operating as a sort of give-away, McGlennen’s collection weaves childhood memories, family histories, and present-day memorials as a means to forge paths of continuance of Indigenous culture. Narratives range from the connective trails of blueberry picking and walleye fishing, to the tragic freeways of protesting an execution at San Quentin, to the regenerative passageways of falling in love and giving birth. Finally, through the gesture of feeding “those networks of connection,” each poem invigorates the life-ways inherent in sustaining cultural relationships even when one finds herself a great distance from her home.

Table of contents:
Contents
Preface
To-Do List Before Writing a Poem:
Legend
Living the Language
Dream Song
Learning Irony in Order
Our Hands
What Red Leads To
How to Make Rock Soup
A Trail of Devotion
For Uncle
In Spirit
Shanawdithit, the Last Beothuk
War Curio
At the Oakland Indian Charter School
Tour Guide
Maneuvering Targets
Silent Death
Paper Hearts
Once She Was a Ghost
Double Vision
Swallowing Her Words
Columbus Day
Composition
What Holds Us
Preparing for Flight
Letter
Letter II
The Dance
From the Kitchen
Yosemite, 1976
Exposed
Film Clip
Interwoven
Luminary
Remembering Louis
Coming Back Round
Three Poems for Ellia
So Many Times I Have Missed You
At the Sushi Bar
Wine Tasting
Weaving Water
Synonymous
10 Little Indians
Dementia
Epilogue

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Excerpt from book:  

Legend

My body remembers
the time we rolled out dough
for two days.
Flour hands
salted heat
a kitchen like fire.
Careful not to pat it
too thin,
biscuits should fill
empty stomachs
you tell me.
No more school
after fourth grade—
what’s a little girl to do
but listen
and follow the mark
of a hand,
hear a history
punctuated by story,
when your mother
would whisper hers
in between scaling
and gutting
the walleye,
ashamed to admit
how lakes
had always fed her family
how she had married
a pale Frenchman
moved away from the water.
So you
a daughter once removed
now stands next to me—
says history doesn’t have to mean
coming over in a boat,
says this is how
you feed a family:
until your hands and arms ache
until your body remembers
the blood in its lines
like fried fish
and flour biscuits.

Unpublished endorsement:  Molly McGlennen’s poems remind us of the significance of smaller acts as memorials to larger remembrances of the people, places and images that have made us who we are. In these finely crafted, telling poems, McGlennen also reminds us to remember the strength of our relatives and the courage of those who stood strong in the face of suffering and oppression. This is an excellent first collection, full of sympathetic turns, unforgettable faces, hands and moments of imagery, coursing connected lines and empathic associations—all drawing us artfully back to a better sense of who we were and who we have become.

Gordon Henry Jr.

Unpublished endorsement:  “You say poetry/ like dream/ is visited/ by people/ and their stories….Today we pray/ for the coming generations while I ready for bed once again/ days as backdrop/….Five hundred years spill outside my window./ Stars snared in my vigil/ I will dance all night—/ our own drum sending a prayer/ ribbons tied round my song.” Yes, poetry is community building. The poet’s voice is simple and clear and concise and vibrantly alive. Do we need anything more than that? That surely is what we need. Believe it. We must. And therefore to act upon our belief. That’s what Indigenous peoples have said time and time again. That’s Molly McGlennen’s voice. That’s the heart, soul, power, compassion, and spirit of her words. Her clear and concise poetry in Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits is food for our struggle! And food for our victory. “I assemble with the hands of a poet/ who does not know the end/ of her poem….If I use food, it’s mostly/ what I can recall: Wild rice and walleye,/ peeled oranges left for me in the morning….” Yes, let’s eat then and live ever and ever within community our poetry is building!

Simon J. Ortiz

Unpublished endorsement:  Each poem in this collection offers its own gift: a re-imagining of forgotten figures of Native history, a lush and gentle reverie on the legacy we leave our children, the reclamation of lives daily “parceled” by institutional education. Taken together, McGlennen’s poems—“picture words imagined in blood,” “memories that flesh her fully”—build like those who populate them a vital continuance for a colonized culture. In finely pitched tones, this poet combines songs, family stories, recipes, and regrets—the vegetables, seasonings, and stones of a lyrical rock soup. The images accumulate—“each drawing an act of survival;” the simple wisdoms sustain us—“these directions are small rushes of air.” In “Album,” McGlennen writes, “Tear open these words. This poem is gratitude.” By the end of the collection, the reader wants to inscribe her own gratitude—to the poet.

Kimberly Blaeser

Unpublished endorsement:  In poems that glide like water and sing with silt, submerged in a history insistent upon rejuvenation, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits introduces the reader to an intimate side of Native life in a 21st century America. Nimble in her ability to weave childhood memories with ancestral antecedents, Molly McGlennen is a rare and welcome voice on the poetry landscape.

Matthew Shenoda