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Original Fire

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Overview

In this important new collection, her first in fourteen years, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry.

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Author Information

Bio of Louise Erdrich

The daughter of a full-blooded Chippewa, Louise Erdrich was born on July 6, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, the daughter of Ralph and Rita Erdrich, both of whom were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's heritage may explain her focus and interest in the Native Americans who populate her writing. In speaking of her childhood, Erdrich relates how her father used to give her a nickel for every story she wrote and her mother would provide construction paper for book covers. She always felt like a published author. In 1981 Erdrich married Native American author Michael Dorris and together they published The World's Greatest Fisherman, which won the Nelson Algren Award in 1982. In 1984 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine, which is an expansion of the story she cowrote with Dorris. Love Medicine was also awarded the Virginia McCormick Scully Prize (1984), the Sue Kaufman Prize (1985) and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel (1985). In addition to her prose, Erdrich has written several volumes of poetry, a textbook, and short stories and essays for popular magazines. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for professional excellence, including the National Magazine Fiction Award in 1983 and a first-prize O. Henry Award in 1987. Erdrich has also taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and Dartmouth College.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

694.54 KB

Number of Pages

176

eBook ISBN

9780061199233

Excerpt from: Original Fire by Louise Erdrich

Jacklight
The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one's bare hands.

R. W. Dunning, Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa (1959)

We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,
out of hiding.

At first the light wavered, glancing over us.
Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,
searched out, divided us.
Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.
Each of us moved forward alone.

We have come to the edge of the woods,
drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,
this battery of polarized acids,
that outshines the moon.

We smell them behind it
but they are faceless, invisible.
We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,
mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.
We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.
We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,
teeth cracked from hot marrow.
We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,
of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.

We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.
We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.
We smell their minds like silver hammers
cocked back, held in readiness
for the first of us to step into the open.

We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of leaves creaked shut, out of hiding.
We have come here too long.