Description
Poetry. Native American Studies. Denise Low's MÉLANGE BLOCK maps a vivid landscape of Native American and settler lives. High Plains country, volcanic fields, wine country, and ghost towns are among the sites where Low casts spells of her beautifully felt language. Natural processes, like crystallization and aggregation, appear as topics and then reflect in the language itself, which becomes its own geography. Through her lens, the American continent patterns a new poetics in this innovative work. Very conscious of her identities as a person of Native and European heritages, she navigates through past and future until they join in one continuous history. Rain Taxi's reviewer said of her work, it is "surgical with the familiar and charming with the ancient." Midwest Review of Books notes her "talent for tilling the surface and digging deep beneath topsoil to unearth legacies."
"Denise Low's poems have the effect of intensifying everything: nature, history, even the present moment. Her language has had its soft fascia removed from around the muscular nouns, verbs and vivid images. 'Particles vibrate,' she says and shows, 'inside limestone ledges.' These are tough poems, in which every single word has an edge. That's the message, here, whether the subject is ancestry or 'fog over asphalt.' Take the eye of the backyard fox. Take the silicate grasses. Line by line, Denise Low elevates and thereby honors the details of our lives and our land. She has created poetry anew, right in our midst; as she, herself, would vividly say, 'Weathered outbuildings shelter crazy prophets.'"—Robert Stewart
"'Aim for the eye,' Denise Low writes and in her poetry, she constantly threads the most precise images through the the sturdy music of each poem's world. Low speaks with intelligence, art, and originality. Altogether, the poems in this collection delve into the nuances of various elements of a life to show us an expanded understanding of the layers of reality. 'May all our bones rest in peace,' Low writes at the end of 'Flint Hill Lullabies,' showing us how history travels in our bones and the bones of wherever we live."—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
"Revealing a highly observant eye and sensitive ear, this mélange (mixture of styles, shapes, colors, or rock matrix) deals honestly with a landscape of subjects—from growing old to a family freezing one bitter winter to Dega 'rasping / charcoal against grained paper.' Their clarity and compression encompass us all."—Mary Harwell Sayler
"Nearly every poem in this collection emphasizes the striking of that balance between calm observation and insistent, active control. Additionally, it meets this tall order itself through Low's canny, judicious wordplay. [...] MÉLANGE BLOCK cuts straight to the crux of its own purpose as a catalyst for the reader's growth. Look around you, Low cautions; take hold of your world, lest it 'spins out of reach' 'Recursive') [...] Precision is one secret of Denise Low's new poetry volume. MÉLANGE BLOCK is a wise, carefully crafted collection that holds hidden knowledge for all readers. Slip between its covers, and sharpen your mind."—Tyler Sheldon, Coal City Review
Author Bio
Denise Low, the second Kansas Poet Laureate, is award- winning author of over 30 books of prose and poetry. She blogs, reviews, and co- publishes Mammoth Publications, which specializes in Indigenous American authors. Forward Reviews writes of her memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival: "An accomplished poet, Low's well-honed prose flows with lyric intensity." In American Book Review David Carlson wrote of her JACKALOPE (Red Mountain Press): "an engaging and humorous read, one that reveals a great deal about the parallel, contemporary Native America that exists and thrives." Other recent books are SHADOW LIGHT (Red Mountain Press, 2018), MÉLANGE BLOCK (Red Mountain Press); Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan Press), Ghost Stories of the New West (Woodley, Kansas Notable Book and The Circle -Best Native American Books); and NATURAL THEOLOGIES: ESSAYS (The Backwaters Press).
She teaches professional workshops nationally as well as classes for Baker University's School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She founded the Creative Writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she taught for 27 years. Low is past board president of the national Associated Writers and Writing Programs, and she currently is a contributing editor to the Writer's Chronicle. Her MFA is from Wichita State University and PhD is from the University of Kansas. A fifth-generation Kansan, she has British Isles, German, and Delaware (Lenape/Munsee) and other heritages.
Author City: LAWRENCE, KS USA