Publisher: Mongrel Empire Press (January 15, 2017
Language: English
Paperback: 80 pages
ISBN-10: 0997251735
ISBN-13: 978-0997251739
Cost at time of review: $15.00
5 Stars
Erika Wurth is Native American, and this book of prose and poems gives us an in-depth glimpse of what life is like for her, and dare I suggest, also her friends both known and unknown. What it is like to grow up not white in one’s own country where the dominant caste and culture is Euro-centric white.
Leaving the Glow is her first poem in this book where, “There are fireflies here, // We were greedy and beautiful and even ideal, / our white hands and Indian hands praying the same way,” before scattering into adulthoods, “leaving the glow of the evening far behind.”
There is pain in these poems, pain of loss, of love, of growing. She leaves nothing out, she gives us the hurt but also the beauty if one will just see it, welcome it. There is the beauty, even in pain.
Wurth’s poems are accessible to anyone who has ever breathed, who has ever been in love and lost that love. And found love again. Whether that love is family or romance or good friendship. The last poem, Light Over the Grass brings us back to more fireflies and a man she loved and could never have, who is now “…trapped in ice, / forever pure and still and smelling of sweetgrass. / Oh M, Mark, my M, my light, my wound…/ you are the light dancing over the grass…my God, where have you finally / gone?”
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