BkMk Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-943491-26-1 Library of Congress Classification PS3563.I688A79 2020 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK These poems explore interlocking themes of sacrifice willing and forced and the sacred dimension of nature and the need for healing in the suffering world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah A. Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of European ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earned a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington in 2001. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. She is Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. professor of English at Washington and Lee University.
REVIEWS
“The element called Colonialism is composed of ‘toxic events,’ Deborah Miranda says, so she urges us to choose ‘Indigenous elements/Story, Dance, and Song.’ These elements allow Miranda to look on damage and still worship creation’s gorgeousness and life. Each poem is a ripeness offered—to unknown gods—in fruit, flower, feathers, even flesh ended in rampage, the burnt sacrifice implied in the word altar. Yet in these poems bees still pollinate, oysters still make pearls, women still yearn to scratch ‘the smell of exile’ and brokenness off their skins to wade away from regret, to die blessed or live free in the world’s many waters.”
—Heid E. Erdrich
“Altar for Broken Things is a lyrical pilgrimage for devotion and integrity in which the land itself is the site of worship. Miranda’s poetry takes an encompassing view of the ways that perception and intent intersect with faith. An altar, the reader is reminded, takes its name from elevation. As these poems guide the reader, it is made clear that altars abound. The currents of these poems move in the territory of the sublime, but the abiding faith and beauty of the speaker’s telling is an unimpeachable guide.”
—Laura Daʼ, Transmotion
These poems explore interlocking themes of sacrifice willing and forced and the sacred dimension of nature and the need for healing in the suffering world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah A. Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of European ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earned a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington in 2001. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. She is Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. professor of English at Washington and Lee University.
REVIEWS
“The element called Colonialism is composed of ‘toxic events,’ Deborah Miranda says, so she urges us to choose ‘Indigenous elements/Story, Dance, and Song.’ These elements allow Miranda to look on damage and still worship creation’s gorgeousness and life. Each poem is a ripeness offered—to unknown gods—in fruit, flower, feathers, even flesh ended in rampage, the burnt sacrifice implied in the word altar. Yet in these poems bees still pollinate, oysters still make pearls, women still yearn to scratch ‘the smell of exile’ and brokenness off their skins to wade away from regret, to die blessed or live free in the world’s many waters.”
—Heid E. Erdrich
“Altar for Broken Things is a lyrical pilgrimage for devotion and integrity in which the land itself is the site of worship. Miranda’s poetry takes an encompassing view of the ways that perception and intent intersect with faith. An altar, the reader is reminded, takes its name from elevation. As these poems guide the reader, it is made clear that altars abound. The currents of these poems move in the territory of the sublime, but the abiding faith and beauty of the speaker’s telling is an unimpeachable guide.”
—Laura Daʼ, Transmotion
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
How to Love the Burning World
Bird Church
Offerings
Acorn
Taksita
Tears of the Sun
Eastern Box Turtle
My Crow
Intention
Scar
Gloaming
What Whales Want
La Arribada
Looking for a River
Venice Beach
Bird Church
Altar for Broken Things
Corazón Espinado
Questions About Lightning
Still
Companion
Step into the Blur
Adiositos
That Word
Elegy for a Nomad
Questions About the Afterlife
Hagiography
The Blow
All One
Altar for Broken Things
The Hand of God
God’s House
Careless Atlantic
Kakalu-ichi
Palimpsest
Love in the Margins
When You Forget Me
If I Say the Words
January
Bee Balm
Ursa Major
What the Shuttle Driver Told Me
The Hand of God
Prayer of Prayers
After Charlottesville
Almost Midnight
Things Fire Can’t Destroy
26 Ways to Reinvent the Alphabet
Weather Report
Fever
Transit of Venus
Indigenous Physics: The Element Colonizatium
When My Body Is the Archive
The Last Poem
Prayer of Prayers
Special Thanks
Publication Acknowledgments
Notes
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
