Indigenous Poets You Should Know

Craig Santos Perez is a CHamoru poet (and performer, activist, and scholar) whose works are, in a word, impressive. I love them for their ability to speak to a multitude of audiences at once. Sometimes his poems are funny, other times touching, and still other times serious. Oftentimes, he offers readers opportunities to support anti-colonial and environmental efforts — sometimes through hypertext, but not always…because Perez’s poems are incredibly versatile. They’re also wide ranging; for instance, his four-part collection From Unincorporated Territory (the first book of which is pictured here) explores everything from Spanish colonization to the birth of his daughter. Each book can be read on its own, or you can read them in sequence (which is quite an experience). Alternately, if you’re especially interested in issues tied to global climate change, you might give his most recent collection Habitat Threshold a try. Bonus: if you’re interested in literary criticism, you can check out his recently published Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization.

The title of jaye simpson’s debut collection sets the tone for the poems inside. It’s about so many things, from queerness to Indigeneity and beyond. Some of the poems are long, sprawling across multiple pages and consisting of multiple segments. Others are short and swift, lasting just a few lines…but the ideas stay on your tongue for hours or days. It’s a hard collection to sum up in a short space, but perhaps that says something in and of itself.

Hinemoana Baker’s poems have always struck me as possessing that seemingly-impossible characteristic of being alternately smart, funny, and intense. Sometimes they’re all three. Often more. In this collection, for instance, the poem “The Good Ship” begins by talking about those details you sometimes learn but wish you could unlearn: “Shirley Temple’s hair wasn’t really curly. / Babies masturbate in utero.” Where does it end? Why, with the poet’s date pontificating about aliens and lizard people, of course. And then there are poems like “Aunties,” which on the surface appears to riff off of Joy Harjo’s famous poem “She Had Some Horses” but in all other ways is entirely Baker’s. It’s a poem about family and its attendant spectrum of emotions. Funkhaus is fresh and funky and absolutely incredible.

Diaz’s first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, made a big impression for its powerful engagement with everything from Indigeneity to family. Her subsequent work Postcolonial Love Poem made an even bigger splash (it won the Pulitzer). It’s no wonder, either. In “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word” she asks, “Where have all / the Natives gone? / If you are where you are, then where / are those who are not here? Not here.” For me, Diaz’s poetry is full of beauty…and then there are these little moments embedded within each poem that just jump off the page. Another one is in “American Arithmetic” (the title of which already gets me) where she writes, “In Arithmetic and in America, / divisibility has rules— / divide without remainder.” Bonus: If you want to take a little poetic detour, read “Envelopes of Air,” a poetic letter exchange between Diaz and Ada Limón.

Pico’s poetic tetralogy — consisting of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed — follows the character Teebs (Pico’s alter ego). Each book has its own distinct style. (IRL, for instance, is written as a long text message.) Nature Poem, in which Teebs can’t bring himself to write a nature poem as a Native American poet, is one of my favorites in the series. It’s wonderfully irreverent in its dismissal of settler colonial stereotypes. And, like each of Pico’s works, it’s full of humor even when it’s dealing with serious subject matter (like genocide or sexuality).