National Monuments: Poems by Heid E. Erdrich(American Indian Studies)

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.

Table of Contents:

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