Manifestation Wolverine
The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The American Book Award–winning collection from “The best poet in Indian Country” (Sherman Alexie, New York Times–bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven).
Hailed by the Bloomsbury Review as “the nation’s foremost contemporary Native American poet” and by Sherman Alexie as “the best poet in Indian Country,” Ray Young Bear draws on ancient Meskwaki tradition and modern popular culture to create poems that provoke, astound, and heal.
This indispensable volume, which contains three previously published collections—Winter of the Salamander (1979), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001)—as well as Manifestation Wolverine, a brilliant series of new pieces inspired by animistic beliefs, a Lazy-Boy recliner, and the word songs Young Bear sang to his children, is a testament to the singularity of the poet’s talent and the astonishing range of his voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Young Bear, a Meskwaki Native American, gathers his three previous releases and introduces a set of new poems in a volume that is predominantly concerned with the natural world and Native ritual beliefs. The book's tone alternates between reverential and ominous: "there are plants breathing wisdom," the land is "slender with meanings," and the sun is seen "ripping its face apart/ and dividing the skin to the eager crows." Elders figure throughout, including one who speaks to the recently deceased in order to "hand them/ their last dream." Another elder's chance encounter with Marilyn Monroe is elevated to mythological status over years of repetition. Young Bear exhibits a jadedness regarding alcoholism, violence, and corrupt community politics, as well as justifiable vitriol for the disregard to nature exhibited by the local whites with their "17th century/ instincts" of exploitation. His new material deals heavily in psychic visions, which were hinted at in earlier poems: one speaker intuits clues about grisly crimes while seated in an enchanted recliner, while another receives information about a missing airplane directly from his kidney. Some elements of Meskwaki tradition may seem inscrutable to newcomers. There is a distinct pleasure in watching Young Bear's work mature and grow more playful over the arc of his career.
