Restless Continent

About this book

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Native American Studies. Ecopoetics. Winner of the Gold Medal for the 2017 California Book Award in Poetry. Lush with elemental imagery Aja Couchois Duncans RESTLESS CONTINENT communes with a North America that speaks elegiac celebratory and melancholic histories human and geological. In this collection the body of that land and those histories fuses with the body of Duncans language the body of memory and the physical body. Intertwining English with Ojibwe this debut collection of poems ominously hails and holds us in its ethereal sound bearing sharp witness to the ruptures perpetuated by the violences of humanity--bodies and lands colonizing and colonized naming and othering stamping life into disappearance--while inviting us to forge with Duncan the mythologies that suffuse her poems with crystalline grace and gratitude. "The first thing to grow isnt always pretty writes Aja Couchois Duncan but the teeth of survival go for exquisite jugulars in this debut collection: images of oceans below our skins deserts swimming in desire and always always a vast and frightening hunger. These poems hiss with life the sharp edge of alphabets that wont be tamed. My heart almost cant bear such precision; Duncans split tongue pierces the page. Such gratitude is a stunning gift."--Debra A. Miranda "In Aja Couchois Duncans quest to re-envision a living mythology that gives body and voice to those vital presences that have long haunted the margins of Western knowledge and experience we too are given a chance to reformulate and reassert our relationship to ground to wind to language which Duncan shows us--through a graceful and vigilant thinking line--are all one and the same. There is an intelligence here that Ive been missing in contemporary poetry one that writes into a we an I a you a she a he acutely aware that these categories are constantly re-directing themselves toward the unknown and are always only a fraction of. An extraordinary debut."--Renee Gladman "In this collection Couchois Duncan carves re-ignites and empties the notions of America First Peoples Time Physical Evolution and most critically the core assumptions of Woman and Being. How do we know without the thread of history? she asks. English / Ojibwe crash against each other and scatter the in-between explosions and exploitations and usurpations--all of this damage and displacement forges and props to some degree an extinct womb where god is not allowed. Is emergence birth genealogy possible? This text is a mind devouring set to investigations--cast in a careful and precise aesthetic of line stanza and framed silences on the page. One of Wittgensteins questions would apply here--How do I know I am touching my fingers? That is How do I know I begin and where I end? What terms? Aja finds ways--an incredible and exacting tour de force!"--Juan Felipe Herrera "RESTLESS CONTINENT is a mesmerizing feast. Catastrophe and prophesy the narrowing points of equilibrium balance us within a rush of epic investigation in ethics--in everything. This stunning image-ridden verse heads full-on into a revelatory world cleaved split into spiders back. Here with Aja Couchois Duncans searing poetic we swim into it. There is a music here somewhere between Dark Water Rising and Tanya Tagaq. Nothing like this. Alluring."--Allison Adele Hedge Coke