Words Like Thunder

Presented as an interconnected sequence of “new and used Anishinaabe prayers,” Beardslee’s timely debut places age-old poetic traditions in dialogue with contemporary ones. These carefully linked texts take the form of flash essays, micro fictions, and other kinds of hybrids that resist genre categorization. Throughout, the speaker expresses her fear that tradition will be forgotten: “Back home, the piebalds lived business as usual... Praying out loud in desperation, with no new generations/ To come home and renew their songs and stories with changing histories and lessons.” Beardslee inhabits and revises the received tropes of storytelling, from oral tradition to the strictures of traditional poetic forms like couplets, tercets, and quatrains. Indeed, the speaker of these hybrid pieces describes her search “for coping mechanisms and transformations among changing environments and unpredictability.” These “changing” conditions give rise to literary collage, hybridity, and experimentation within received structures. True to Beardslee’s artistic intention, this book explores tradition through innovative techniques that will appeal to 21st-century readers. (Apr.)