Wow. Where to begin? Layli Long Soldier's Whereas is a collection of poetry that explores the personal and the political, but the latter from a deeply personal perspective, all the while looking at how language is used and abused and restructured and changed. It's a book in which poems take many forms: prose poems, simple lined poems, poems where the word placement on the page is every bit as important as each word itself. The language itself is often deceptively simple, but devastating. The title comes from a section of the book, Whereas, which is a response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans signed by President Obama. True to the book's direct look at literature itself, each part of this section opens as if it were some kind of governmental proclamation: "Whereas"...
"WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a new program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn't recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother's face the mother's blubbering her hiccupping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she'd never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother's face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel."
I fully admit there were sections I didn't understand. But I think this is a book that bears multiple readings. There is a repeated motif of grasses which is explained later in the book, and just having that info will give a different reading the next time around. And isn't that poetry--the ability to find new things, learn new things, see new things, with repeated visits? Highly recommended.