Synopses & Reviews
Intimate, dissecting, and liberating,
Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and
renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what
endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections,
poems explore pop culture--the stereotypes in
Peter Pan,
Indiana Jones, and beyond--fairy tales, myths, protests, and
forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems
that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.
Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a
celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and
of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can
reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what
healing might look like when loving the world around you--and introduces
readers to a profound new voice in poetry.
Review
"Kenzie Allen's
Cloud Missives renders an unchartable landscape, 'wide as a
child's face, ' in poems that enact Indigenous autoethnography and a
profoundly embodied recovery operation. These are poems of revelation
and repair, twenty-first-century poems that extend the work of the lyric
into the territory of 'elegy against elegy, ' love songs written to
drive out violence and exoticization masked as love, and poems that wake
to the desire to awaken. Along the way, there is exhumation in all its
forms, of pop culture signifiers, from
Peter Pan's Tiger Lily to Indiana Jones, and revivified
archetypes, from the ghost of the British Empire to the Evil Queen,
harpy, fanged siren. Most crucial is the disinterment of personal scars
and the violence they represent, and ancestral bones, 'piled, piled, /
piled; piled; PILED; PILED, / nameless, done in, / piled--piled--piled, '
each twisted foot and chipped skull a clue to an origin story and 'a
keyhole to let angels in, ' and the indefatigable voice out. Allen has
written a masterwork of self-reclamation and survival through
love." Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
Review
"This incredible debut announces Kenzie Allen as an important voice in
Native literature. Through impeccable craft, she explores themes of
health and healing, Indigenous genealogy and identity, kinship and love.
These poems are a 'song against the song of our demise.' May their
missives travel far and wide; may their words bloom like
sweetgrass." Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory
[åmot]
Review
"With archeological care, Allen begins a poetic and meticulous
examination of the layers of life. Often surprising, these poems 'know
violence / like it made me--rage / like it rocked me to sleep.'
Intensely scrutinized events that involve Native women are separated
into strata to reveal a powerful self and a voice that seems to have
been waiting beneath the pressure of years to, at long last,
speak." Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully
About the Author
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in
Poetry magazine,
Boston Review,
Narrative, T
he Paris Review's The Daily,
Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West
Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway;
and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.