Poets have been writing about love for centuries, so it is thrilling when a new voice comes along capable of breathing new life into old structures. In (At) Wrist, Tacey Atsitty melds inherited forms such as the sonnet with her DinE (Navajo) and religious experiences to boldly and beautifully seek a love that can last for eternity. Celebrating and examining the depth and range of her relationships with men, Atsitty tenderly shares experiences of being taught to fish by her father, and, in other poems, reveals intimate moments of burgeoning romantic love with vulnerability and honesty. Through these poems, grounded in a world both old and constantly remade, she reminds us that it is only by risking everything that we can receive more than we ever imagined. The result is a collection that lives simultaneously under the stars and in our dreams. All I know is it's the season when wind comes crying, like a baby whose head knocks a pew during the passing of the sacrament, that silence- her long inhale filling with pain. Excerpt from "A February Snow"
Tacey M. Atsitty, DinE (Navajo), is TsEnahabilnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta'neeszahnii (Tangle People). The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, Atsitty is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets fellow and holds degrees from Brigham Young University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Cornell University. The author of Rain Scald, she is the director of the Navajo Film Festival, a member of the Advisory Board for BYU's Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and a board member for Lightscatter Press. Atsitty is a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University.
A February Snow Sonnet for My Wrist Bird Dance Round Our Wrists Out of Star Sang Over Chafe Apricot Lament Hole through the Rock Querido Apu Lace Sonnet Still Life Morrow River Silt The Night My Wrist Broke Last Night, Bleeding A Blood Letting On Innocence When It Was Time Scaling the Black It's Hard to Write a Love Poem When Candy Dish Sonnet Into Rain Of Ribbon The Warbler Night Portrait with Cannon Fire Pollenback Portrait of a Gray Room ) ( Lacing Acknowledgments
As formally seductive as it is subversive, Tacey Atsitty's (At) Wrist is a poetry of deep longing and praise, of loss and the courage of resilience. Anchored in an intimate vision of connectedness, her syntax works its way beyond thought's limit, setting its hook in the terrain of memory and dream. This is a book I will return to for what no other poet I know delivers with such daring and vulnerability, a poetry wherein time, body, and the natural world are presented as a singularity otherwise known as love." - James Kimbrell
