Description: Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore the experience of being Native in Academia--from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. This collection illuminates the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.
Review Quotes:
"With wry humor moistening the margins of her poems, Jenny Davis showcases how her Indigenous people have become experts in sorrow and seethe."--Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
"The poems in Davis's collection lean into the creative ironies only a slippery operator like Trickster could unearth, stemming from Chickasaw oral traditions and storied experiences. Distinctive about Trickster Academy is Davis's teasing of language, which complicates the reductive impulses of Western institutionalization, anthropological canonization, and social ostracization. This twenty-first-century two-spirit, Indigenous poetic narrative continually jabs at destructive assumptions about Native life as it carves beautiful, yet deeply complicated, connections to homelands. All readers will love how the collection builds upon foundational Native writers who turn to the generative nature of trickster-as-poet, rendering carefully the unburdened imaginings of Indigenous realities and futures."--Molly McGlennen, author of Our Bearings