Flood Song

"I bite my eyes shut between these songs." So begins Flood Song, a concentrated, interweaving, painterly sequence in which Native tradition scrapes against contemporary urban life. In his second book, Sherwin Bitsui intones landscapes real and imagined, populated with the wrens, winds, and reeds of the high desert and constructed from the bricks and gasoline of the city. Reverent to his family's indigenous traditions while simultaneously indebted to European modernism and surrealism, Bitsui is at the forefront of a younger generation of Native writers. His poems are highly imagistic and constantly in motion, drawing as readily upon Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and medicine songs as they do contemporary language and poetics. "I map a shrinking map," Bitsui writes, a map tribal and individual, elemental and modern - and utterly astonishing.