Exploding Chippewas - Hardcover

Turcotte, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810151227 ISBN 13: 9780810151222

Publisher: TriQuarterly, 2002

Synopsis

The stunning classic from the 6th Illinois Poet Laureate

Everything this poet touches is volatile—the poet himself, the people and world around him, ideas and mythologies, the ghosts of memory and the dream of possible futures, all seem to burst into fragments. Mark Turcotte uses poetry to gather up the pieces—the shards of joy and grief, peace and doubt, strength and temptation, questions and answers—as he tries to define and rediscover what is lost when everyday life becomes explosive.
 

About this title

About the Author

MARK TURCOTTE (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) is the 6th Illinois Poet Laureate. He spent his earliest years on North Dakota's Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation and in the migrant camps of the western United States. Later, he grew up in and around Lansing, Michigan.

Arriving in Chicago in the spring of 1993 Turcotte rediscovered his love of words and writing and quickly established himself as a unique voice in the city’s thriving poetry scene. That summer he was winner of the First Gwendolyn Brooks Open-mic Poetry Award.

Turcotte is author of The Feathered Heart, Songs of Our Ancestors, Road Noise, Le Chant de la Route, and Exploding Chippewas (Northwestern University Press). His work has appeared in many national and international literary journals and is included in the new and first ever Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Turcotte was the recipient of a 2001-2002 Lannan Foundation Literary Completion Grant.

In 2008 he completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. After graduation he served as the 2008-2009 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He again lives in Chicago and, since 2009, has been Senior Lecturer and Distinguished-Writer-In-Residence in the English Dept at DePaul University.
 

From the Back Cover

Everything this poet touches upon is volatile-the poet himself, the people and world around him, ideas and mythologies, the ghosts of memory and the dreams of possible futures, all seem to burst into fragments. Mark Turcotte uses poetry to gather up the pieces-the shards of joy and grief, peace and doubt, strength and temptation, questions and answers-as he tries to define and rediscover what is lost when everyday life becomes explosive.

The first part of the book is a series of lyrical poems that all begin with the phrase "Back when I used to be Indian," a self-contradictory concept that strikes at the heart of Turcotte's identity. Accompanied by memories and ghosts of the past from the Native American world, he uses his marvelous gift of metaphor to take us from "the rez" through his experiences of mainstream American life. His absent father and his own experience of fatherhood are the subjects of a second group of poems, leading him to explore the legacy that burdened his father and, in turn, the different kind of legacy that now burdens him. In a third and final group, Turcotte's imagination reaches again into the many flames of his experience, leading toward the title poem, where even the most dangerous of fires become a guiding light. His words embody a history and a linguistic power that make his poems flash with the energy of a startling vision and a dark hope.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Burn
Back when I used to be Indian
I am crushing the dance floor,
jump-boots thumping Johnny Rotten
Johnny Rotten. Red lights blue bang
at my eyes. The white girl watching
does not know why and it doesn't matter.
I spin spin, eat I don't care for breakfast,
so what for lunch. She moves to me,.
dark gaze, tongue hot to lips. The music
is hard, lights louder. She slides low
against my hip to hiss, go go Geronimo.
I stop.
All silence he sits beside the fire
at the center of the floor, hands stirring
through the ashes, mouth moving in the shape
of my name. I turn to reach toward him,
take one step, feel my skin begin
to flame away.

Edition details

• Publisher: TriQuarterly
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810151227
• ISBN 13: 9780810151222
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 83