Currents
Currents is a poetry collection that layers Diné language, bodily labor, and doubt toward American myths and faith. The poems move between the concreteness of construction work and symbolic currents, sounding personal history alongside Indigenous memory.
Work Information
The texture of work and the flow of myth become the same current in the poems.
Blending English, Spanish, and Diné resonances, the book turns the poet’s work as an electrician and the memory of community into poems. It explores the violence and faith beneath American landscapes with restrained music.
Review Summaries
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Though brief, the collection is received as memorable for its mixed languages and tactile sense of labor. Its density asks readers to attend to silence and gaps.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Bkmk Pr/Umkc
- Published
- 2017-11-01
- Pages
- 66 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 0.43 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781943491117
- ISBN-10
- 1943491119
- Price
- 2744 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Winner of the American Book Award Featured on Verse Daily These poems explore American identity and the powers of myth, faith, doubt, and the environment, and the music of these poems resonate with strains of the English, Spanish, and Diné languages. Louis, who has worked as a construction worker and electrician, moves fluently between the literal and symbolic dimensions of work, as he writes in the poem “Electricity”: “Any laborer gathered for a tear-out / agrees the pleasure of opening walls/is the view of what’s no longer behind.”
Bojan Louis is a member of the Navajo Nation—Naakai Dine’é; Ashiihí; Ta’neezahnii; Bilgáana. He is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and poetry and production editor for RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities , and the author of the nonfiction chapbook, Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona . He has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony.