Suntree’s many years of writing, performing, and activism inform her work. So it is in part her cumulative wisdom and insight that makes this book so strong. Here we have a model for a much larger project: indigenous and Western poets and scientists swapping stories, singing their best songs around the same fire, working hard to keep the world in balance. That is going to take every song we’ve got.
Book Two:The Origins of Southern California: Indigenous Myths and Songs
The book’s title itself starts us off with just such a seen silence. The waters of. Of what? Of Babylon where we wept, remembering? Of Siloe, where we hold our tongues and meditate? The Housatonic that flows through her neighbor fields? Sea that washes all away? That of makes us see something, a place or word, just as so often the line will end, startling as a knock on the door. We hurry to open it to see who’s there.
[Reprinted from the original 2016 publication by Lunar Chandelier Collective]
NOTE. Published earlier this year by 20/20 Vision Publishing in the UK, of which Woolley writes, relating to both the title & the concept: “For a story to be broken means that once upon a time it was whole. A story is never finished; one leads into another. However, in these dystopian times, this process has become more complex; the story teller meets interference. These narratives that used to exist, that helped to hold a culture together are being broken by certain people for their own ends (political and corporatist) or are being weakened in our hi-tech world (with or without our collaboration). We haven’t yet produced a strong enough narratology to take their place.”
black
she brings black flowers black flowers to black weddings
Poems and poetics