About the Book
A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing--and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual. "Draw me encircled // in something // other than gasoline." The poems of Rose Quartz hum with the naked energy of one who has found her way home after a journey rife with difficulty and who has the scars to show for it. In them, Sasha taqwsəblu LaPointe moves from intimate scenes of peril--a car accident, an unwelcome advance at a party, a miscarriage--to the salvific, exhilarating punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and the centering shores of her Coast Salish ancestors. Along the way, she peers into the darker corners of her own search for belonging, and finds there glittering stones dense with meaning and the power to move forward.
As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above--rose--vie for the speaker's embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power.
Like the stones and cards laid on an altar, Rose Quartz offers a reading at the intersection of identity and myth, trauma and truth, telling the story of past, present, and future.
About the Author :
Sasha taqwsəblu LaPointe is the author of Rose Quartz. She is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Red Paint, and holds a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Yellow Medicine Review, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.
Review :
Praise for Rose Quartz "The clarity of the poems in Rose Quartz is like the clarity produced of 'a fire that eats itself / back to blackness, ' which is to say, this collection brings the reader not to a position of mere interpretation--which necessarily disrupts the grim political arduousness of reading an Indigenous writer through our proximity to (the subjects of) loss (of lands, of safeties, of selves, of time)--but rather to the cusp of transformation. There is no artifice here, but art; no choreographed formula the poet is performing. Instead, 'now the sky is black / the waves only exist because we can hear them / beyond, ' for LaPointe is a poet whose interests are not the surfaces of words, but their depths. Read Rose Quartz to consider the translucent lyric--for the dream of a woman who tells our dreams--remembering the muddying of sacramental wine with blood. For here is blood: sourced from veins as mammary as they are literary."--Joan Naviyuk Kane "In this dynamic and deeply moving collection of poems, Sasha LaPointe somehow does the impossible: sharing her own selfhood, self-mythology, and history while also inviting us to make our own vulnerable journey in understanding our own. Here is not only an exploration of history, family, culture, the sacred, and the secular, but a song of love to the world--even when the world might not deserve such a song."--Matthew DickmanPraise for Red Paint"Absorbing . . . A worthy tribute to Coast Salish women."--Time "LaPointe recounts the interconnected stories of her life and the lives of some of her ancestors as Coast Salish women living in different time periods on their ancestral lands. These simultaneous threads capture resilience, trauma, love, healing, and connection. . . . Her work is definitely something to be watched."--Shondaland
"The Pacific-Northwest native's story is one of survival. . . . LaPointe reckons with a fraught past by weaving together memoir and poetry to create something that feels raw and unfiltered."--Bust
"[A] poetically punk debut memoir about ancestry, loss, colonialism, rebuilding, power, hope and healing."--Ms.
"Set against a backdrop of of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, [LaPointe] offers up an unblinking reckoning with persona traumas amplified by the collective personal traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal."--Shelf Unbound
"Red Paint offers a poetic narrative of trauma and healing through ancestral rites and punk rock, both of which prove to be potent medicine during LaPointe's excavation of family legacy and matrilineal power. . . . LaPointe's quest to wear the red paint of her ancestors in the context of her own life as a poet and performer integrates the twin strands, past and present, of this stunning memoir. For LaPointe, restoring the self to health is entwined with restoring Native women's voices that have been erased throughout history. She uses her own luminescent voice to tell their stories, wielding language, words, ritual and community as tools of contemporary and ancestral healing."--Bookpage
"In Red Paint, LaPointe delivers a cutting, artful thrashing of settler colonialism and a sensitive exploration of ways of healing and forging space for community and connection through storytelling. . . . LaPointe's intimate prose is introspective, raging and funny. . . . [She] explores her experiences and familial legacies in a wash of rage, beauty, love and reclamation of strength via storytelling."--Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Throughout [Red Paint], the author deftly navigates multiple timelines, weaving in and out of family history, personal narrative, and a host of other tangential topics. . . . Although the author does not shy away from heartache and sorrow, readers are welcomed on what is ultimately a healing journey that will stick in their memories. An engaging, poetic, educative examination of the search for home and personal and cultural identity."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] stirring debut . . . LaPointe writes in lucid vignettes that alternate between past and present as she reflects on her ancestors, Salish medicine workers who 'faced violence, disease, and genocide'. . . . LaPointe's fresh and urgent perspective on Indigenous culture is enthralling."--Publishers Weekly
"Red Paint is an ode to healing and to healers, told by someone who intimately knows both. Steeped in punk music and poetry, it is an ode to indigenous inheritance, and to the work and wisdom necessary to recover from the legacies of trauma. It is the truest kind of love story: one in which every lover is a MacGuffin, propelling its narrator toward the person who matters most--herself."--Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
"Red Paint is a miraculous book. LaPointe walks us through the sites of her evisceration while rebuilding a home within her body using sturdy materials: rose quartz, cedar bark, red clay, and the words of her ancestors. With each potent sentence, she shows us what access to power looks like. She shows us how to become whole."--Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic
"As luminous as the morning sun over the fir forests, Red Paint is a story of where strength takes us. LaPointe goes looking to the past to help heal from terrible traumas, finding inspiration in her ancestors, the Salish people. This is a book destined to be a classic. Read it."--Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder
