This reading by alumni, mentors, and the current director of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program is a gathering of poetic voices who all identify as Indigenous. This reading will be as diverse as it is enthralling. These poets, who come from all parts of the country and the state of Wisconsin, have committed themselves to the act of rewriting the literary landscape by proving that Indigenous poetics is both vital and vibrant. Spend Indigenous People's Day with current city of Madison Poet Laureate, Angela C. Trudell Vasquez; former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Kimberly Blaeser; Joaquin Zihuantanejo, winner of the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry; and Santee Frazier, award winning poet and current director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program as they read from their latest collections. This will be an evening to remember.

Join the event at: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/wbf-indigenous-poetics. Before the event begins, you will see a countdown and the event image.

About Copper Yearning: Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision―bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser’s fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world―for the ineffable.

About Aurum: Unflinching and magnetic, the language and structure of Aurum never strays from its dedication to revealing the prominent reality of Native people being marginalized and discarded in the wake of industrial progress. While uncovering different forms of oppression that estrange Native Americans from their own land, these poems explore the raw and disturbing aspects of living in the wastelands of contemporary America. Aurum does not attempt to provide answers or solutions. Instead, it splits the belly of North America and lays it bare into powerful words and unconventional structures. Brutally honest and incredibly fine tuned, this collection digs up “the grit where teeth once rooted” to show the objectification of Native peoples and cultures for the grotesque erasure it really is. With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier’s first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Each poem is vivid and memorable, beckoning to be read again and again as the words lend an enhanced experience each time. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.

About In Light, Always Light: "The poems of In Light, Always Light afford space for the lyric to clarify and delineate the self “… through the ravine to the seam / the V peak of the hills / where dappled light spills / between rocks and discarded beer cans.” Here Angela Vasquez presents poems that struggle to contend with family history, a history of diaspora and relation, of assertion and insistence that the reader and the poet must bring to bear the imperative of  “yes, yes fight back.” The poems travel, as we do, to observe the poet in the eternal dimension where one must write, and read — “Let me sit in sadness for a spell. / I need to write this out." –Joan Naviyuk Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow

About Arsonist: "Arsonist is a shape-shifter of a book, a book that leaves the reader with an existential 'shivering', yet, it is on fire. Loaded with lethal chemicals, like, let us say, desire, abandonment, separation and industrialized lives without homelands, burning in their brutal severance, Arsonist is a spilling and boiling caldron of zig-zag figures, of wild colors split from their root, 'a son's desperate attempt to / clear the air' -- of things that long to congeal, yet, they smash into blanks, smoke and the questions of forgiveness and birth. Here, a relentless, piercing clarity, a precious text without trappings, an examination of loss and love. I salute Zihuatanejo for this blistering beauty among the ashes.

Indigenous Poetics