Dissolve - Softcover

Bitsui, Sherwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155659545X ISBN 13: 9781556595455

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2018

Synopsis

“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” ―Library Journal

Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century’s most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

From “(Untitled)”:

. . . Jeweled with houseflies,
leather rattles, foil-wrapped,
ferment in beaked masks
on the shores of evaporating lakes.
This plot, now a hotel garden,
its fountain gushing forth―
the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award. He currently lives in Arizona where he has serves on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

About this title

About the Author:

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award in 2010. He currently lives in Arizona where he has served as the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts since 2013.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

from "Dissolve"
On limbs of slanted light

painted with my mind’s skin color,

I step upon black braids,

oiled drenched, worming

from last month’s orphaned mouth.
Winged with burning―

I ferry them

from my filmed eyes, wheezing.
Scalp blood in my footprints―

my buckskin pouch

filling with photographed sand.
No language but its rind

crackling in the past tense.
(Untitled)
An elegy hands me a busy signal,
its handle broke me from my tooth.
I chew its answers

until I taste cracks

in the chrome

outline of a sky (without hands).
Notice: every link in the trail to here
is a bullet's path to back there.
(Untitled)
A hovering smear

trailing desert washes

fenced in with a murder of mirrors

illumines the eating groaning over us.
Nibbling blades of winter light:

the goat’s bleating leased downwind

pastures among foals dripping out

of hollowed-out dictionaries.
Jeweled with houseflies,

leather rattles, foil-wrapped,

ferment in beaked masks

on the shores of evaporating lakes.
This plot, now a hotel garden,

its fountain gushing forth―

the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.
(Untitled)
There’s a way out―

walk the dirt road into cerulean dawn,

tap the windows of cars and trucks

rattling down highway 77

with clear fingerprints,

and clasp the nine eyes of the desert

shut at the intersection of then and now.
Ask: will this whirlwind

connect to that one,

make them cousins to the knife?
Will lake mist etched

on flakes of flood-birthed moonlight,

hang its beard on a tow truck

hoisting up a buck,

butterflies leaking from its nostrils,

dark clouds draining off its cedar coat?
(Untitled)
Ladders follow us from mines

in which our quivering

stretches hospital gowns

into looms of lightning.
We shake ground deer hooves,

on the four directions of forgive,

while tire-lit flames grope

the underside of a spider web’s webbed thinking.
Nearing sandbank,

gray hair bending out of it,

a witness witnessed―

maps of jet fuel residue

draining mosquito hum

on the beginnings of our eyes.
(Untitled)
A phantom arm feeling

wants them to return their feet.
Falling from their cut hair:

hearth sounds sunlighting

the hallway back to then.
Will their torched names

walk again as lake water?
Will they charge a fee

to re-sharpen the horns

of our dull speech?
(Untitled)
Ladders follow us from mines

in which our quivering

stretches hospital gowns

into looms of lightning.
We shake ground deer hooves,

on the four directions of forgive,

while tire-lit flames grope

the underside of a spider web’s webbed thinking.
Nearing sandbank,

gray hair bending out of it,

a witness witnessed―

maps of jet fuel residue

draining mosquito hum

on the beginnings of our eyes.
(Untitled)
Cranes pass as swans

through tunnels underneath this dreaming,

I breathe it in.
Cave paintings stammering from their speech of clear water

hoof this chamber quiet,

I breathe it in.
Charred cradles, tethered to anchors,

molt beside bleached saddles,

I breathe it in.
The dark before me―unfolded from bead-pressed earth,

sparkles, howls, whistles,

I breathe it in.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 155659545X
• ISBN 13: 9781556595455
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80