National Monuments

by Heid E. Erdrich

Overview

Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.
     As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems—filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay—provide.
     Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628954319
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/11/2008
Series:	American Indian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	678 KB

About the Author

Collaborative artist, filmmaker, and independent curator Heid E. Erdrich teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program of Augsburg College. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including National Monuments, which won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Section One. Grave Markers National Monuments 000 Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects 000 Mahto Paha, Bear Butte 000 Black and White Monument, Photo Circa 1977 000 Grand Portage 000 Desecrate 000 Section Two. American Ghosts Post-Barbarian 000 Some Elsie 000 Ghost Prisoner 000 Made in Toyland 000 Ghost Keeper 000 Infinite Progression 000 In Search of Jane¿s Grave 000 Not Seeing Ground Zero in 2005 000 Liminal 000 The Theft Outright 000 Ghost Town 000 Odean 000 Ghost of Love 000 Elsie Drops Off the Dry Cleaning 000 Butter Maiden and Maize Girl Survive Death Leap 000 The Lone Reader and Tonchee Fistfight in Pages 000 Ghost Nation 000 White Noise Machine 000 Star Blanket Stories 000 Do You Know the Secret of Johnnie¿s Cole Slaw Mix? 000 Full Bodied Semi-Sestina 000 Section Three. Discovery (An RSS Feed Series) Body Works 000 eBay Bones 000 My Beloved is Mine 000 Ghostly Arms 000 Kennewick Man Tells All 000 Kennewick Man Swims Laps 000 Kennewick Man Attempts Cyber-date 000 Prisoner No. 280 000 Vial 000 Girl of Lightning 000 We Would Not Believe 000 Nefertiti¿s Close Up 000 Pharaoh¿s Hair Returns 000 Antigone Finds the Field Grown Full 000 Personality 000 She was the Kind 000 Gazing Globe 000 Goodnight 000 Post-Professorial 000 A Plane Full of Poets 000 Earthbound 000 Afterwords 000