A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings

by Eric Gansworth

Overview

Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically, historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth’s poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry, creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth’s remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York’s Indian communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815656265
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/05/2022
Series:	The Iroquois and Their Neighbors
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Eric Gansworth (Onondaga) was raised on the Tuscarora Reservation and is professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.

Table of Contents

Illustrations     xi
Acknowledgments     xiii
Artist's Statement: Cross-Pollination     xv
Inspiration
A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function     3
Beat: Where the Dawes Act Finds Its Voice
Cross-PolliNation     9
Arrivals and Departures     11
Wade Wakes Me with Sweat, Tears, and, Yes, the Rest Too     13
Fireball     15
Transplant     16
War Pictures     19
Kodak Moments and Some Without the Flash     21
Illumination     22
You Are Here     24
Brothers, Night Only     26
Visitors Pass     28
In Tandem     30
In the Current at Dusk     31
This Is Also Just to Say     32
It Is Only Later That I Understand Why You Flinched     33
The Negotiations We Make     34
Histamine     36
Where the Dawes Act Finds Its Voice Even Now in Northern New York     39
How to Make a Cornhusk Doll (I)     42
Pause: The Rain, the Rez, and Other Things
The Rain, the Rez, and Other Things     47
Among Your Possessions     64
Transgression, Middle of the Night     66
Leave     70
All This and More Contained in a "Hello"     73
Learning Curve     74
The Way Howdy Reveals     75
Everyone Had a Hard Year     76
How to Make a Cornhusk Doll (II)     80
Beat: Learning to Speak
Dreamcatcher     85
Loving That Land O'Lakes Girl     87
Understanding Eliot, Maybe, after All These Years     89
Radio Free Indiana     92
Cancellation Line     93
Perspectives on Impact     95
Steve Tells Me When He Knew Things Would Get Back     96
Century Twenty-One     98
(Not) Born in the U.S.A.     100
Dakota (I)     105
Dakota (II)     107
Dakota (III)     109
Dakota (IV)     111
Rabbits Concrete and Abstract     114
Holding the Shell to My Ear     117
How to Make a Cornhusk Doll (III)     119
Expiration
Learning to Speak     125