Seven Hands, Seven Hearts: Prose and Poetry
"Her poems are like hands and hearts and also like lights: they grip and pulse and illuminate. Like the woman herself, the work is grand and modest and forceful. It will shake you, and move you deeply."--The Bloomsbury Review "Woody follows in the tradition of peoples who have understood the power of language, and the place of a poet/singer/storyteller at the center of the world."-- Joy Harjo
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Seven Hands, Seven Hearts includes the entirety of Elizabeth Woody's highly acclaimed first book of poems, Hand into Stone - winner of the American Book Award - as well as new poems, stories, and essays. The work is united by common themes: a rootedness in the Northwest landscape, the histories of her ancestors, and the ongoing struggle to define what it means to be a tribal member, an American, and a woman at the end of the twentieth century.
Introduction11Buckskin21Homecooking25Story Power33Reminiscent of Salmon Woman41Water Combined with Throat Singing42The Bridge43Horse and Woman44We Remember Our Relatives45Weaving46Shells on Stone47Longhouse I48Longhouse II49Sisters?50Sisters51Speelyay Thoughts in Seattle52Speelyay, Again!53Coyote Folklore, in Image and Practice54Distant Cousins55Deer!56Chinle Summer57Unity58Wyam: Echo of Falling Water63In Memory of Crossing the Columbia70Black Night Stones and the Shine of Abalone71Hand into Stone73Of Steps to Drowning74She-Who-Watches, the Names Are Prayer76The Sense78Originating Fire79Black Fear80Shaker Church Prayer82Birds in This Woman84Spider Woman's Coyote Bones89Scratch Medicine and Tenements94Siamese Ghosts (The Disturbed Spirits)96Speaking Hands104Custer Must Have Learned to Dance106She Is a Stranger to Intimacy107A Warrior and the Glass Prisoners111Cold Blood116Hand to Hand, the Circles Embrace118Our Reverence and Difficult Return119Notes on the Poems123
