Best Poetry Books of 2011 - Tiffany Midge

Tiffany Midge's selections:

Words Facing East by Kimberly L. Becker (Of Cherokee/Celtic/Teutonic descent) (WordTech)
In Words Facing East, Kimberly Becker aligns us with rose lines, ley lines leading language reclamation along the riverway serpent she locks onto with the subtle force of finding her natural family course after lifetimes away." -- Allison Hedge Coke

Night Cradle by Sy Hoahwah (Yappituka Comanche and Southern Arapaho) (USPOCO BOOKS)

Killing the Murnion Dogs by Joe Wilkins (Black Lawrence Press)
"In Killing the Murnion Dogs, the old lonelinesses, bodied forth by whisky in jam jars and rotting porches, highways, wolves, the dream of escape, are reinhabited and updated by Joe Wilkins' own urgent interrogations." -- Lia Purpura

What the Alder Told Me by Anita K. Boyle (Moonpath Press).
"Anita K. Boyle is a poet daring to the rigors of describing the indescribable. Articulate, lush and with a precision of a raindrop falling from eaves of a barn that lists to its side, Boyle's work attends to a still life portrait of perpetual astonishment." -- Tiffany Midge

Our Blood Remembers by Lois Red Elk (Descended from the Isanti, Hunkpapa, and Ihanktowan bands of the Dakota/Lakota Sioux Nation) (Many Voices Press)
"The poems in The Blood Remembers by Lois Red Elk make a circle from the old days and old ways to the present where ghosts of the past walk with the living." -- Adrian C. Louis

A Large Dent in the Moon by Monty Campbell (Cayuga Tribe of the Six Nations) (FootHills Publishing)

Anthology: Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press)
"What a diverse feast of poetry! Indigenous poets from Puru, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Canada--as well as the United States--serve up delicious unforgettable poems. A good number of the poems are composed in indigenous languages, which make this collection especially valuable." -- Leslie Marmon Silko

Journal: South Dakota Review: Vol 49 Issue 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2011 edited by Lee Anne Roripaugh (University of South Dakota)


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Tiffany Midge is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. She is the recipient of the Diane Decorah Poetry Award from The Native Writers Circle of the Americas for her collection, Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed published by Greenfield Review Press. The chapbook, Guiding the Stars to Their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds, was published in 2005 by Gazoobi Tales. She lives in Moscow, Idaho, is a graduate from University of Idaho's MFA writing program and teaches part time for Northwest Indian College.