In The Next Sky, history haunts and poems grapple with nostalgia and pain, the ancient and contemporary, to make sense of the places they intersect.
Pulsing with evocative voice and imagery, Sherwin Bitsui’s The Next Sky ruminates on the past, present, and future, questioning where living things fit into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, blackbirds sigh obsidian and the “land whispers its name.” The air is woven by laughter and breath becomes “a knot of lung steam” hidden behind a rib cage. From fragmented and surreal, to haunted and intimate, the poems in this book-length sequence ebb and flow, washing over readers like a wall of rain—fleeting and resonant. As the ancient collides with the modern and temporal, The Next Sky navigates ideas of culture and identity through explorations of land, place, and nature. “Insisting: Dusk is just skin worn on faces,” Bitsui blurs the line between humans and nature, collapsing what we know of language and time.
About the Author :
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003), Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and joined the faculty at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 2019.
Review :
Praise for Sherwin Bitsui
“Bitsui's poetry is elegant, probative and original. His vision connects worlds."—New Mexico Magazine
“His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible."—Arizona Daily Star
“His poems are wide and deep arroyos and mesas of human perception, conceptual word paintings born of agony and joy."—Joy Harjo
“Bitsui's poetry highlights a difference between how it may be read inside and outside of Native American communities. 'Non-Indigenous readers are permitted, even invited, to read such poetry,' Reed says, 'only to have the fullness of its meaning withheld."—Pleiades
