Bone Light

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Overview

Orlando White explores language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective. One idea that interests him, inspires him to think and write, is the idea of the English language as a forgotten language.

Imagine if we as a people, all people in the United States, are speaking an Indigenous language rather than English; that the English language exists merely as a language of the colonial past. White explores and experiments with this particular colonizing language, because that language remains a kind of cultural/intellectual/social threat to Indigenous thought, as English was imposed to dehumanize Indigenous peoples from their culture, language, and consciousness.

White's Diné perspective poetically reveals audience notion of linguistic dehumanization within the Bone Light volume. Non-Natives, throughout American history, have documented the Indigenous Americas using the dominant written word of English. Thus, as an artist, White writes what he writes to document as well, but also to create something a bit more beautiful (intriguing) than harmful (erasing). White is not attempting critique of the English language; he is working with it to gain a better understanding of viewpoints, veritably creating a relationship by way of exploring language.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of sound, sequence, and sense, some fixed order separating right from wrong. In this debut, White, a Diné (Navajo), never gives up the innocence of the icons: the stars he saw in his rattled head took the shape of the Alphabet, and "years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems." White tries to remain true to the core, the bones, of language. His hope is to explore an indigenous thought that has been corrupted by the cultural, intellectual, and social threat that English has imposed. He thus experiments with line, space, and syntax: "A man in a black suit with a zero/ for a head follows me. He carries a gun/ shaped like language; wants me written/ and dead on the page." Such original, and even daring, ideas are clearly not intended for every reader and not meant for every collection, but for those who are up to the challenge, White's poetry will provide a curious twist.
—Louis McKee

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781597091350
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication date: 2/15/2009
Edition description: 1
Pages: 64
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.80 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Orlando White is Diné (Navajo) from Sweetwater, Arizona. He is of the Zuni Water Edge People and born for the Mexican Clan. He received his A.A. and B.F.A. in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a recipient of a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Zora Neale Hurston award from NaropaUniversity, and many other poetry scholarships from the Idyllwild Arts, NapaValley, and Taos summer writing programs. He has been involved with many mentor programs and has taught creative writing to elementary, high school, and college students in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, New York, and Rhode Island. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Red Ink Magazine, To Topos, 26 Magazine, and Ur Vox. He is currently in the M.F.A. literary arts program at Brown University.

CONTENTS TO SEE LETTERS 7.

THE i IS A CRICKET 11.

BONE LIGHT 12. SENTENCE 14.

ATS’ÍÍSTS’IN 15.

FILL IN THE BLANK 16.

LIGHT BULB EYE 18.

DISSOLVE 19.

CIRCLE SHAPE 20.

OPEN DARK 21.

HUMAN CLOCK 22.

FROM SKIN TO BONE 24.

BLEACH INK 26.

BLANK CIRCLE 27.

ON THE ZERO’S EYE 28.

SKIN OF LETTER 29.

SKELETON 30.

SQUARE LIPS 32.

IMPERATIVE 34.

BONE MILK 37.

IMAGES OF MYSELF 39.

BLANK SKULL 40.

LOWER CASE i AND j 41.

i WITHOUT j 42.

i-j 43.

ANALOGY 44.

i NEXT TO j 45.

ARS POETICA 46.

DOT FLY 48.

DISCOURSE 49.

MEDITATION 51.

QUIETUS 52.

WRIT 53.

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Bone Light

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Overview

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More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

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Product Details

Meet the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

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