Dissolve

by Sherwin Bitsui

Overview

“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” —Library Journal

Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century’s most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

From “(Untitled)”:

. . . Jeweled with houseflies,
leather rattles, foil-wrapped,
ferment in beaked masks on the shores of evaporating lakes.
This plot, now a hotel garden,
its fountain gushing forth—
the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award. He currently lives in Arizona where he has serves on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595455
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award in 2010. He currently lives in Arizona where he has served as the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts since 2013.

Read an Excerpt

from "Dissolve" On limbs of slanted light painted with my mind’s skin color, I step upon black braids, oiled drenched, worming from last month’s orphaned mouth. Winged with burning— I ferry them from my filmed eyes, wheezing. Scalp blood in my footprints— my buckskin pouch filling with photographed sand. No language but its rind crackling in the past tense. (Untitled) An elegy hands me a busy signal, its handle broke me from my tooth. I chew its answers until I taste cracks in the chrome outline of a sky (without hands). Notice: every link in the trail to here is a bullet's path to back there. (Untitled) A hovering smear trailing desert washes fenced in with a murder of mirrors illumines the eating groaning over us. Nibbling blades of winter light: the goat’s bleating leased downwind pastures among foals dripping out of hollowed-out dictionaries. Jeweled with houseflies, leather rattles, foil-wrapped, ferment in beaked masks on the shores of evaporating lakes. This plot, now a hotel garden, its fountain gushing forth— the slashed wrists of the Colorado River. (Untitled) There’s a way out— walk the dirt road into cerulean dawn, tap the windows of cars and trucks rattling down highway 77 with clear fingerprints, and clasp the nine eyes of the desert shut at the intersection of then and now. Ask: will this whirlwind connect to that one, make them cousins to the knife? Will lake mist etched on flakes of flood-birthed moonlight, hang its beard on a tow truck hoisting up a buck, butterflies leaking from its nostrils, dark clouds draining off its cedar coat? (Untitled) Ladders follow us from mines in which our quivering stretches hospital gowns into looms of lightning. We shake ground deer hooves, on the four directions of forgive, while tire-lit flames grope the underside of a spider web’s webbed thinking. Nearing sandbank, gray hair bending out of it, a witness witnessed— maps of jet fuel residue draining mosquito hum on the beginnings of our eyes. (Untitled) A phantom arm feeling wants them to return their feet. Falling from their cut hair: hearth sounds sunlighting the hallway back to then. Will their torched names walk again as lake water? Will they charge a fee to re-sharpen the horns of our dull speech? (Untitled) Ladders follow us from mines in which our quivering stretches hospital gowns into looms of lightning. We shake ground deer hooves, on the four directions of forgive, while tire-lit flames grope the underside of a spider web’s webbed thinking. Nearing sandbank, gray hair bending out of it, a witness witnessed— maps of jet fuel residue draining mosquito hum on the beginnings of our eyes. (Untitled) Cranes pass as swans through tunnels underneath this dreaming, I breathe it in. Cave paintings stammering from their speech of clear water hoof this chamber quiet, I breathe it in. Charred cradles, tethered to anchors, molt beside bleached saddles, I breathe it in. The dark before me—unfolded from bead-pressed earth, sparkles, howls, whistles, I breathe it in.

Editorial Reviews

"The formal integrity of Bitsui’s lines enables seamless transitions from the momentary to the timeless, from each disorienting and dazzling idea to the next... Bitsui’s exhilarating poetics lay in the blur of time, the slow and sure slide from ghostlike ideas into haunted-looking things, in constant erasure and redrawing: 'No language but its rind / crackling in the past tense.'"—Publishers Weekly

"Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman’s drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg’s supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, ‘a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,’ that you will not find anywhere else."—Sherman Alexie

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry."—Library Journal

"[Bitsui's] images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are. In struggling to reconcile these opposing forces, his poems and prose poems enact a personal ceremony."—Arthur Sze

"When one runs across a young poet of incredible ability, it is hard not to pay attention. Sherwin Bitsui is such a poet, and his second book (Flood Song) presents a startling approach to Navajo experience... These untitled sequences of lyrics are disturbing in their familiar beauty and draw the reader into internal states that only a poet of an ancient land could translate into universal understanding."—Bloomsbury Review

From the Publisher