Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship and a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her work of poetry, WHEREAS, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Long Soldier resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she is an English faculty member at Diné College.
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WHEREASPoemsFrom"Steady Summer"
I don't trust nobody
but the land I said
I don't mean
present company
of course
you understand the grasses
hear me too always
present the grasses
confident grasses polite
command to shhhhh
shhh listen
WHEREAS:Poems -
WHEREASPoemsFrom"Vaporative"
However a light may come
through vaporative
glass pane or dry dermis
of hand winter bent
I follow that light
capacity that I have
cup-sized capture
snap-like seizure I
remember small
is less to forget
less to carry
tiny gears mini-
armature I gun
the spark light
I blink eye blink
at me to look
at me in
light eye
look twice
and I eye
alight
again.
WHEREAS:Poems -
WHEREASPoemsFrom"IRONY"
I am this
salivating
mouth without
hands with-
out arms
bent down
shameless
face to plate to
some original
hunger aware
that I'm alone
and I alone am
the one -> pushing
the head
to eat
WHEREAS:Poems
“It’s no exaggeration to say that I was blown away when I first read Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas project . . . trenchant, beautiful thinking and writing about the relationship between official political speech and literature’s capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier does, with a sensibility so tough and gentle, so sure of itself and so questioning, that I find myself simply standing back in admiration, savoring every perfect, necessary word of her intervention. I imagine the whole of Whereas one day being read in its entirety to and from the hilltops, in all its intimate wonder. I hope to be there.” ―Maggie Nelson, PEN Poetry Series
“In her writing, Long Soldier emphasizes possibility, not closure. She articulates her message without defining answers.” ―citation for Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship
Layli Long Soldier is the poet-architect in the arena of witness and longing. Her work interrogates poetic form and the legacy of a history of brutality and extermination. Her collection, WHEREAS, continually asks questions of both the reader and the author as Long Soldier considers the way Native American identity can be expressed on the page—what language should be used, what rules should be followed? What does authenticity or authorship mean when so much of one culture has been wiped out by another? Elegant and painful, formally surprising, personal and historic, this is a fearless, polyphonic crossing of cultures and languages in the service of both tenderness and trenchant critique.