Monkey Secret collects three short stories and a powerful novella by the Cherokee-German-English poet and prose writer Diane Glancy. Her tales of Native American life explore that essential American territory, the border-between: between past and present, between native and immigrant cultures, between self and society.

There is a saying in Native American tradition that "wholeness is when the shadow of the rider and his horse are one." Although we usually focus our attention on what seems most real, Diane Glancy shows us that the shadow of our past has substance as well.

The Shadow's Horse is a new collection of poems in which Glancy walks the margin between her white and Indian heritage. In poems that conjure the persistence of fallen leaves or juxtapose images of Christ and the stockyards, she powerfully evokes place and spirit to address with intelligence and beauty issues of family, work, and faith.

In some of these poems Glancy recalls growing up with her Cherokee father, who worked in a stockyard, radically applying Christian theology to the slaughter of non-human creatures: The cattle go up the ramp
dragging their crosses.
Their voices are Gregorian chants
rising to the blue sky,
the cold clouds.

In others she examines the walk of history through the ordinary details of life-history seen from two points of view, early Euro-American and contemporary Native American. She sees her Native heritage as shortlived and fragile, yet as enduring as leaves, and she asks, "If you line up all the leaves that fall / how many times will they go around the earth?"

Writing in a cross-boundaried, fragmented voice—a voice based on the memory of the way language sounded when it was stretched across the cultures or walked in both worlds—Glancy has fashioned a book about speaking oneself into existence. The Shadow's Horse is the story of one culture made to sing the song of another until the Native voice is so erased it is nearly an illusion. Yet as readers of these poems will discover, the shadow of the past is as real as the horse it rides.

1990 Winner of the Mildren P. Nilon Award for Minority Fiction

In Trigger Dance, her first collection of stories, Diane Glancy takes us to uneasy places where both the environment and the characters are at risk, where even the animals grieve. Sometimes the author's voice, sometimes the voices of the characters, tell us about their migrations, symbolic or literal. Diane Glancy's characters walk in two worlds and try to build a middle ground between white and native cultures. They are the offspring of those who survived the Trail of Tears. Some of the young men dance at powwows in tune with the dead. Filo and Parnetta buy a fridge at the Hardware Store on Muskogee Street, in Tahleqah, Oklahoma. Farther west, near Chickasha, Keyo can't read, while Joseph Sink, an Indian hermit, learns a word a day. Anna America remembers her shortcomings as a mother and her hard life as she waits in the Northeastern Cherokee County Shelter for her wings to unfold so she can leave this earth. In the title story, Roan mourns the fact that human beings have the power to destroy the earth. He's astonished that creation and cremation could be so closely linked. Even his father, when he feels death approach, demands to be cremated because "it's autumn in outer space." Roan's final vision in the sweat lodge is of the air red as leaves. He admonishes his people to be strong and responsible, to acknowledge that life is a sizeable endeavor. it.