Böcker av Jennifer Reeser

In Strong Feather, Jennifer Reeser revisits the salient themes of Indigenous-her acclaimed, award-winning preceding poetry collection. While the poems in Strong Feather reprise the exposition of a Native American heritage juxtaposed with a mixed European ancestry, many of them center on a Native American female character of the author's creation-a poet/prophet/warrior of sorts. Displaying a masterful command of form throughout, Strong Feather also includes personal poems, translations, and tales from Cherokee and other indigenous traditions. The result is a spellbinding and uniquely engaging collection of storytelling, mythmaking, and inspirational musings, energized by a keenly interrogated mixed-race heritage.End of the winter, middle March,Waking, I find it beneath my quiltClinging to linens the hue of larch,Softer and whiter than milk when spilt-One petite feather. Its hollow "hilt"Pointing toward me, is curved and long,Slightly translucent, and at a tilt.How has this feather stayed so strong?. . . .PRAISE FOR STRONG FEATHER:What I love most about Jennifer Reeser's poems is their swagger. Not conceit (there's none of that) but rather a delightful confidence in her art and in her judgments. Maybe that's communicated by the title of her new book, before we even get to the first poem. Can a feather be strong? You better believe it.-John Wilson, Englewood Review of Books + Marginalia Review of BooksJennifer Reeser's Strong Feather continues her personal legacy of applying classical technique to make another world visible. Like Countee Cullen of the Harlem renaissance, she is a master of rhyming forms that present life beyond the expected edges of formal verse. Witness the marvelous "Shape Shifter," a Petrarchan sonnet like no other, or the stunning "The Courier du Bois and the Savage," an ekphrastic poem written as an English ode but conveying a modern message about equality. Her elegant use of rhyming couplets in "White Lady" concentrate the poem's illumination of contrasting lives. A hundred pages of such treasures will bring you lives you might not otherwise meet and pleasures you would otherwise miss.-Arthur Mortensen, Expansive Poetry OnlineABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Strong Feather (Able Muse Press, 2022), and Indigenous (Able Muse Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Poetry Book of 2019 by Englewood Review of Books. Reeser's poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, Light Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of European American and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana and now divides her time between Louisiana and her land on the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Country near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation of which her family is a part.

Jennifer Reeser’s Indigenous is, by turns, a celebration of her Native American heritage and a lamentation decrying the social injustice and tragedies endured. Through Reeser’s sublime craft and formal prowess, ancestral memories and spirits—both the immediate and the historical—are visited with chants, prayers, or rituals: be it imagined, culled, or translated in the backdrop of history, myth, and lore. Reeser also immerses us in her mixed-race heritage, in the “bloody war/ Inside of me, between the Red and White.” This collection is as uniquely inspirational and thought-provoking as it is fun—a collection not to be missed.PRAISE FOR INDIGENOUSThe beauty of this collection of poems is the way it uses every device capable of reaching the reader. These poems go behind the familiar: Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, figures such as Sequoyah and Chief Joseph; past the artifacts, legends, and folkways encountered through reading and travels across America, to the intimate details of a specific family and their lives and world seen from the inside. They give, as our literature seldom does, moral weight to the real and living representatives of those nations, rather than to the romanticized or demonized figures imagined by film. In all, Indigenous is more than simply a good read, or a compelling account of events we need to know better: it’s an addition to our national literature by Jennifer Reeser—an accomplished poet who knows, and understands intimately, what she is so generously sharing in her work.—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of And After AllJennifer Reeser’s new book of poems, Indigenous, provokes a strange sensation in the reader: an alien yet familiar landscape peopled with recurring characters, the mingling ghosts of history haunting the here and now and reanimating the myth and lore of her folk, both tragic and comic—as inseparable from Reeser’s imagination as they are from her blood. Each poem enters into dialogue with the reader even as it maintains an ongoing conversation of sound and sense with the other poems in the collection, a steady, sturdy examination of essential tensions: what it means to be a descendant of the First Nations, an heir to Christian grace, and a poet writing in modern American.Already a master of poetic forms, Reeser has reapplied her talent in what amounts to a major development in her repertoire, bringing the reader to that Native American borderland of the heart that has apparently been a major part of her life, but a part we’ve only seen in glimpses up to now.—Joseph O’Brien, poetry editor of the San Diego ReaderABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of five collections of poetry. Her first, An Alabaster Flask, was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X. J. Kennedy wrote that her debut “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her third, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, The Lalaurie Horror, debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry. Reeser’s poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, LIGHT Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home.