Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two collections of poetry: Flood Song (Copper Canyon) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is Diné of the Todích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizílaaní (Many Goats Clan) and holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and a BA from University of Arizona in Tucson. His honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a 2006 Whiting Award in Poetry. Bitsui has published his poems in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere.
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ShapeshiftPoemsFrom"At Deer Springs"
Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.
Snake dreams uncoil,
burrow into the spine of books.
Night spills from cracked eggs.
Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.
We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.
Shapeshift :Poems -
ShapeshiftPoemsFrom"Bodies Wanting Wood"
When the fire turns
I lotion my arms
The woman weaves a storm design
Smells rain in the canyon floor
The wind in winter sleeps between our fingers
During prayer
It is released and blows into town
A swarm of locusts with wings on fire
Shapeshift :Poems -
ShapeshiftPoemsFrom"The Hoof in My Soup Glistens"
This house burns clumps of cumulus against its back.
Blisters in the core of a dime rubbed on my neck,
like rubbing the hood of a ’57 Chevy with a bar of soap.
Or turtle shells on powder-scented rocks in a tub of lemon juice.
Black pearls dipped in salt sink into my chest.
Teapot hisses.
A cheetah has been pulled from its skin.
Shapeshift :Poems
"When one runs across a young poet of incredible ability, it is hard not to pay attention. Sherwin Bitsui is such a poet, and his second book (Flood Song) presents a startling approach to Navajo experience . . . These untitled sequences of lyrics are disturbing in their familiar beauty and draw the reader into internal states that only a poet of an ancient land could translate into universal understanding." —Bloomsbury Review
"Bitsui's richly textured contemporary lyric is one that is characterized by visceral language, urgent rhythms, and the abstraction of archetypal and cultural images and symbols which 'speak a double helix' . . . Major themes in Bitsui's dazzling second collection include the loss of language, agency, and sacred cultural symbols, which explore 'some piece of an idea of NOW / before it becomes WAS' . . . Flood Song demonstrates the mature development of one of our generation's most gifted and promising voices." —Southwestern American Literature
“Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman’s drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg’s supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, ‘a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,’ that you will not find anywhere else.” —Sherman Alexie
