The Rock Island Hiking Club
“I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that Ray Young Bear is the best poet in Indian Country and in the top 46 in the whole dang world. Sacred and profane, profound and irreverent, his poetry pushes you into a corner, roughs you up a bit, maybe takes your wallet, and then gives you a long kiss goodbye.”—Sherman Alexie
“It's good to be back in Tama County, home of Young Bear's previous collections, The Invisible Musician and Winter of the Salamander. Once again Young Bear takes out his Big Chief tablet and we read further into the annals of the Black Eagle Child Settlement. A curious mix of biting patriotism and pop culture, Edgar Bearchild and Selene Buffalo Husband and the other lovables are here as Young Bear pastes a face back over the 'cultural disfigurement' that native peoples have suffered.”—Diane Glancy, author of The Relief of America
” …read one of his poems (if you can stop at one) and you will see what Blake calls the eternity of the imaginaton opening up before you.”—Robert Gish
“… always sonically delightful and startlingly funny … Working the spectrum from ethnography to poetry, from comedy to tragedy, this is a thoroughly entertaining, yet deeply affecting study in cultural contrasts and similarities”—Publishers Weekly
The narrator in this latest collection of poems by Ray Young Bear is alter ego and spiritual seeker Edgar Bearchild, who balances the hapless polarities of life in the Black Eagle Child Settlement with wry humor, a powerful intelligence, and the occasional designer drug. Bearchild is forever infused with revelations both modern and ancient, forever influenced by tribal history, animism, supernaturalism, religion, and mythology.
Whether faced with tragedy or comedy, Bearchild lives in a world replete with signs and portents, from the Lazy-Boy recliner that visually accesses a faraway crime to the child's handprint that mysteriously appears on a frosty ladder. Edgar and his wife, Selene Buffalo Husband, and the other members of the Black Eagle Child Settlement create and recreate prophecies that “quietly wait and glow” in the “mythical darkness that would follow the stories.”
Poet, novelist, and performing artist Ray Young Bear is a tribal member of the Meskwaki Nation of central Iowa. He is the author of Winter of the Salamander, The Invisible Musician, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (Iowa, 1992), and Remnants of the First Earth.