Sherwin Bitsui Biography
Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the poetry collections Shapeshift (2003) and Flood Song (2009).
Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems reveal the tensions in the intersection of Native American and contemporary urban culture. His poems are imagistic, surreal, and rich with details of the landscape of the Southwest. Flood Song is a book-length lyric sequence that explores the traditions of Native American writing through postmodern fragment and stream of consciousness.
Bitsui has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
When we are out of gas,
a headache haloes the roof,
darkening the skin of everyone who has a full tank.
...
When we river,
blood fills cracks in bullet shells,
oars become fingers scratching windows into dawn,
and faces are stirred from mounds of mica.
...
1.
The ice hook untwists inside the whirlwind like a tail.
A raven's rib ripped from the electric socket
heats the palm,
...
They inherit a packet of earth
hear its coins clank in a tin box
push them aside
...
What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face?
What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction and brought forth resembling frost?
What offspring must jump through the eye of birth to be winked at when covered with brick sweat?
...
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