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7 books match the query 'Glancy, Diane'

cover of Asylum in the Grasslands

Asylum in the Grasslands

Diane Glancy

University of Arizona Press, 2007

Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and author of more than thirty books, Diane Glancy has established herself as one of the country’s most versatile and prolific writers. Distinguished by her laconic honesty, her unflinching eye, and her skillful articulation of the commonplace, she presents Native American life—especially the ways it intersects with nonnative culture—in all its complexity and nuance.

In her new collection of poems, Glancy explores the history of loss that has marked the Cherokee community. In a voice that is as economical as it is eloquent and as sophisticated as it is exhilarating, she describes the loss of family, the loss of cultural heritage, and the loss of old worlds as new ones encroach. In one poem, a farm auction becomes an auction of culture, of heritage, of the past. In others, ancestors meet in a twenty-four-hour café, lunch is shared with a great-grandmother who has been traveling the universe, Christ appears as a cowboy in an apocalyptic vision, and Clytemnestra is discovered in a snakeskin. Some of the poems are as campy as a duck-decoy Custer in a shooting gallery. Some glitter with dime-store glue. Others speak with the reflection of sunlight off a stream. Sometimes the verse produces a shortstop language on the baseline of experience. In whatever form they take, Glancy’s poems stimulate and challenge the reader with their unfettered, unadorned, and unpretty purity. This collection is not only a spirited ride across the Great Plains, it is also an important addition to the literature of white–Native American cultural relationships.
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cover of Monkey Secret

Monkey Secret

Diane Glancy

Northwestern University Press, 1995

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.
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cover of Primer of the Obsolete

Primer of the Obsolete

Diane Glancy

University of Massachusetts Press, 2004

This remarkable collection of poems explores the conjoined cultures of Indian and European, the revisions the conquered race must face, and the disruption that results from the attempt to combine divergent cultures in a single being. These poems speak from a four-cornered world: Cherokee and white, Christian and conjuring. They attempt to retrieve fragments of language from a nearly erased culture. At times, they speak in the spirit of the remembered language with the new language that is not fully formed in the understanding of the narrator.

The poems have roots in history, religion, and illiteracy. They are inspired by folk artists who use materials and textures at hand—enamel and cornmeal on plywood, house paint on tar and tin, model airplane paint on corrugated scrap metal. The resulting lyrics walk the boundary between worlds, weaving remnants of the old way of viewing the world with pieces of the new world, such as a clapper that turns lights on and off. The experimental text revisits the gap between past and present. The past is just beneath a newly painted surface. The newly painted surface is not quite dry.
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cover of The Shadow’s Horse

The Shadow’s Horse

Diane Glancy

University of Arizona Press, 2003

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.


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cover of The West Pole

The West Pole

Diane Glancy

University of Minnesota Press, 0

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cover of The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East

The World Is One Place

Native American Poets Visit the Middle East

Diane Glancy

BkMk Press, 2017

This anthology explores how the Middle East has captured the imaginations of a significant group of Native American poets, most of whom have traveled to the Middle East (broadly defined to include the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan). What qualities of the region drew them there? What did they see? How did their cultural perspectives as Native Americans inform their reactions and insights? Three thematic sections—Place, People, Spirit—feature poems and notes inspired by the poets' experiences of Middle Eastern cultures. Contributors include Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Natalie Diaz, Diane Glancy, Joy Harjo, Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Bojan Louis, Craig Santos Perez, Linda Rodriguez, Kim Shuck, and James Thomas Stevens.
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cover of Trigger Dance

Trigger Dance

Diane Glancy

University of Alabama Press, 1991

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.

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