"I wrote these poems during November and December of 2022 and January of 2023. They started off without much thought as a way to reflect and share and say something on social media for Native American Heritage Month and then they just sort of took on a wild, galloping, spirit-charged, romantic, and yearning life of their own. After never having written a single poem on my phone, I wrote all of these poems on my phone. I wrote about half of them in the break room at the Co-op where I work and then the rest in my car, in bed, on the couch, in the airplane, in Connecticut, in a hospital, in the library. This book reached out from that same place those original sweet late night gas station energies came from and it compelled me to write it, to go for broke, to scream, cry, grieve, remember, pray, and sing. I listened, I typed with my thumbs, and I went for it; a Ponca with a vision for his people who wanted to embed some real part and presence of it in a homegrown, utterly personal book of poems. The book you now have in your hands."
-From The Introduction
"Cliff Taylor’s poems call us into the sacred space he inhabits as a human, a descendant of Chief Standing Bear, a seeker, and, at his heart, a storyteller. His poetic landscape is equal parts Wounded Knee and Scooby Doo, genocide and rebirth, grief for the lost, yet a reclaiming — both playful and fierce — of what remains. His voice is a landmark worthy of pilgrimage in the sacred geography of Indigenous storytelling, each stanza granting the reader a healing dose of “the medicine of remembering,” to quote the poet himself.”
-Suzanne Ohlmann, author of Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life
“Herein lies the sacred and silly. Lines drenched in ceremony sweat and frybread grease; the ancestral and the rez. Some poems you’ll read aloud like prayer; others are so familiar you’ll laugh, cry, wail, grieve, dance, and love with them. Oh, you’ll mourn the sweat trunks, Sundance with the mutations, and dunk on anyone who can’t get behind a Ponca superhero on the big screen. Thrivance is the realized potential of all these singing poems, these contemporary visions birthing new traditions on every page. The time of leskí Cliff’s Ponca poetics is now.”
-Taté Walker, Mniconjou Lakota and author of The Trickster Riots
“Cliff Taylor writes about writing, vision, hearing, seeing, the voices of the ancestors, children, little people, Bigfoot, the realms, past and future, bridging together in resolute brilliance. Native or not, your perception of the Native Road will clarify, solidify, become real in your own heart. In this life-lived-in-poems, you will feel it, gut, heart, soul. There is no guarding against the depths of emotion here. And it will pick you up. It will move your feet. Give you capes and wings. I never smiled so much when reading a book of poems, as with this one.”
-Barbara Salvatore, author of Big Horse Woman and Maggie
“Cliff Taylor is among the vanguard of this generation of Native writers. Through poetry, prose, or conversation, he tells of his arriving into relationship with his Ponca heritage joyously and with natural and moral beauty.”
-Keyaho Rohlfs, Farmer and Playwright
