Layli Long Soldier

Long Soldier has a certain mastery with form in a way that not only adds another dimension of import to her poems but also isolates words like blades of grass that when put together make a field of meaning. In the third part of the poem "Diction" on page 16, she takes an excerpt from a book by activist/writer Zitkala Sa, "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," and simply redacts certain words from the narrative creating a more sparse and painful reading of it, thereby showing us that it is not only the words one adds to create meaning, it is also the words one strips away or leaves out that create meaning.

The collection is nonlinear too. The poem "Look" did not register with me at all until I got to the poem "38," with the lines,

"One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakota people
by saying, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass."

There are variations on Myrick's words, but they are all something to that effect.

When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed
by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.

When Myrick's body was found

                                                                               his mouth was stuffed with grass" (53).


I then went back and read "Look" with a whole new meaning imbued in the images for me within its blade of grass form,

"quick   dead

grass

             skulls

weight

less   pile...

whythisimpulse

to

shake   the   dead

light

why     do

I    so want the    light

to

blink look

alive move


                  why

do   I   so   want   it


                                     still" (13).


There is so much anger and rage in her words, so much pain and sadness that weave down the page, a thin line of a poem, as thin as the tiny, ever-diminishing strip of land her ancestors were forced to live on, starve on, die on. A thin line twisting it's way back in time like an umbilical cord that connects her to that tribe, and sends the ancestral trauma forward through time at a cellular level so that she feels the pain, rage, sadness, starvation and death as she pulls out the grass from it's roots in an act of defiance to avenge those ancestors. This poem speaks to the expression of that vicarious trauma in her life without the experience of the trauma, and the feelings of confusion that creates. "All is experienced through the body somebody told me" (35), Long Soldier says in part 2 of "Dilate."

The poems about her miscarriages hit me hard as well, "Left." Again, it took a few readings and re-readings because the poems appear after the poem about giving birth, "Dilate." The nonlinear structure of the poems in the first section imitate the larger history she is writing about as if to say, "Yes, now there is healing and life, and life does go on, but now let me tell you of the blood that was shed and the lives that were lost."

Again with structure, "We" can be read both across and the left side as one narrative and the right side as one narrative, which, based on my prior posts, we all know I love.

I loved the collection as a whole, and the deeper I got into it the more intensely I felt Long Soldier's meaning. Part 2 Whereas with its "Dear Girl" piece speaks such volumes to the futility and annoyance of meaningless white tears and is just brilliant the way it circles around to, 'Yea, we got our apology and now there is a whole in my mouth where a tooth should be that will never grow back.'

The poetic form in (2) Resolutions is unparalleled and brings such power to he piece as a finale.