Today’s conversation with Kenzie Allen, about her debut poetry collection Cloud Missives, is unusually wide-ranging. We look at the influence of archaeology, anthropology and cartography on her poetry, and on her notion of gaze within her work. We explore the fraught colonial history of these fields, and how, as an indigenous poet, she orients herself to her own work in this regard. We look at questions of identity, representation and stereotype both in the realm of language and art-making, and also in the realm of tribal sovereignty, looking at the colonial history of blood quantum and its repercussions today. We also look at questions of form, both inherited forms and the creation of new ones, of both poetry on the page, and multimodal works that live off of it, from visual poetry to literary cartography to the wampum belt as an ancient form of hyper-text.

For the bonus audio archive, Kenzie contributes an extended reading of a sequence poem that she calls Love Songs to Banish Another Love Song. By reading this, she gives us a peek behind the curtain of the process of revision, because this sequence is an earlier, very different version of a much shorter poem in Cloud Missives. This joins many other supplemental readings in the archive from everyone from Jake Skeets to Layli Long Soldier, Elissa Washuta to Natalie Diaz, Brandon Hobson to Tommy Pico to Terese Marie Mailhot. You can find out how to subscribe and check out the many other possible benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the BookShop for today.

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