"Hicks, an enrolled citizen of the Osage Nation, debuts with a short-story collection that fearlessly both embraces and upends Native American tradition and storytelling. Young women take center stage as they navigate sex, love, and general life transitions in lands, from Oklahoma to California, that are theirs and not, where they belong and don't... Whether her characters are navigating relationships with white men and women, reconnecting with childhood friends and slipping into speaking Wazhazhe ie (the Osage language that Hicks includes throughout), or negotiating with ghosts of ancestors, Hicks beautifully renders their motivations, contradictions, joys, and struggles. This collection announces Hicks as a writer to know." —Booklist
"A Calm & Normal Heart by Chelsea T. Hicks is a marvel of storytelling and unlike anything I've read before. At the intersection of tradition and technology, past and present, these vivid and absorbing Native characters fill the pages of this extraordinary debut with tenderness and humor.” —Kali Fajardo-Anstine, National Book Award finalist and author of Sabrina & Corina and Woman of Light
"Dark and darkly comic stories that herald an important new voice in American letters." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Unabashedly contemporary, A Calm and Normal Heart documents and channels messy, sexy, people dealing and not dealing with the complex reverberations of our American past in a relentless now. Hicks never shies from the restlessness of racial, sexual, and cultural identity; she embraces her characters’ fragility and obstinacy with an unbound language that is as savvy as it is openhearted.” —Lucy Corin, author of The Swank Hotel
“A Calm and Normal Heart is a fresh and wholly original collection from a shining new star in the firmament of contemporary literature.” —Carla Crujido, Co-editor of Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World
"These stories will break your heart and make you want to dance. Chelsea T. Hicks delivers a striking debut." —Toni Jensen, author of Carry
“Chelsea T. Hicks’s warm, sharp, and searching debut is both a contemporary feat of decolonial poetics (which hopefully will inspire more and more works written in and translated from indigenous languages) and a closely observed, often wryly comic collection of short stories that feels as alive in-the-process-of-becoming as its singular characters: in Hicks’s deft words, its ‘everyday heartbroken players of life’.” —Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart
Brilliant debut stories about the lives of contemporary Native women. Dark and darkly comic stories that herald an important new voice in American letters. —Starred Kirkus Review
Chelsea T. Hicks writes Osages moving home, those who never left, and the webs of conflict in between. She writes our up-to-minute world. ... It's a look at what we've lost through colonization, the theft and violence of oil production, and all that we retain. —Ruby Hansen Murray, Osage writer
★ 2022-04-27
Brilliant debut stories about the lives of contemporary Native women.
" 'Coming home' inspires me to write," observes Hicks, a member of the Osage Nation, in her acknowledgements. Home is important to her characters, too, whether it’s a geographical place (like Oklahoma or California, the sites of significant Osage communities) or a sense of belonging. That’s what Mary, in "By Alcatraz," wants when she finds herself at a Thanksgiving dinner, having to explain to her White-guy host that the “bucolic feast celebrating generosity” was “in fact a mass poisoning.” “What I hate,” she explains, “…is I feel like I live in a different country that’s here, inside this one, but no one believes my country exists.” The idea of home also draws Hicks' self-aware but emotionally shutdown women back to places shot through with trauma, whether historical or personal, and also sends them fleeing. Her women are often the daughters of abusive fathers, the wives and girlfriends of men who don’t hit them too often but don’t really love them, either. They wander so slowly toward decisive action that it’s harrowing to watch them save themselves. In “Superdrunk,” 19-year-old Laney contemplates having an affair with a 30-year-old alcoholic to escape her dad, whose sexual attention has warped her self-worth. But they do save themselves, and it’s a testament to Hicks’ considerable talent that her characters’ senses of dislocation and turmoil are tempered by their feminine power (or “know-how,” as one character puts it) and connection to cultural traditions. These stories often seem a little odd, the events in them random and chaotic, but that’s very much the point. Hicks’ brilliance is that she doesn’t explain things to White readers and doesn’t translate the Wazhazhe ie (the traditional language of the Osage) sprinkled throughout, as though to pose the question: “Whose home?”
Dark and darkly comic stories that herald an important new voice in American letters.
