Heid E. Erdrich

Heid E. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, won a Minnesota Voices award for her first poetry collection Fishing for Myth. She also authored The Mother's Tongue...

National Monuments, Poems by Heid E. Erdrich

Heid E. Erdrich

Winner: 2009 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry; the 21st annual awards are announced by the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library.

Click to read the list of 2009 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD WINNERS, INCLUDING HEID E. ERDRICH FOR NATIONAL MONUMENTS

Read an interview with author Heid E. Erdrich: Erdrich sat down to talk about NATIONAL MONUMENTS, POEMS BY HEID E. ERDRICH in a corner of Birchbark Books, a small bookstore owned by her sister, author Louise Erdrich. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, found the title for her third collection of poetry when she began to think about the sacred places of native peoples, sites that were hallowed ground before they were ever considered for the National Register. To read the interview and hear Heid read her poems, CLICK THE JOURNAL NAME SOUTHWEST JOURNAL


"Erdrich's poems are beautiful and brave explorations of the depths of national identities and the real people who live them...these are poems I loved reading."
— Robert Warrior, Director, University of Illinois American Indian Studies and the Native American House

Deeply observant poems from a Native American poet with a wry sense of humor: Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments — in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains — monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.

As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems — filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay — provide.

Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.

American Indian Studies Series