Description:
Extant confronts the many ways in which Native Americans continue to be associated with the distant past and imagined, even today, as more animal than human. For more than a century, anthropologists, museum guides, and high school teachers have described Native American bodies, cultures, and languages as "endangered" or "almost extinct." Through a combination of blackout poems, occasional poems, and free verse, award-winning poet Jenny L. Davis rewrites the narrative of what it means to exist, to live in a present shaped by colonial violence that emphasizes the power of survival.
Review Quotes:
"The muses of Jenny Davis's poems are soft-bodied earthworms, sidewalk mosses, spawning fish, ancestors, stars, Indigenous languages, and all who live vibrant and vulnerable lives, despite everything aimed at their eradication. Drawing on discourses from evolutionary biology and physics to popular culture and ceremonial song, the poems in Extant root and bloom with longing, beauty, and stubborn insistence on life renewing, and ever renewing again."--Beth Piatote, author of Distant Water: Poems.