Effigies II

These five first books join to represent a freshly emerging 21st Century Indigenous Mainland poetry. This collection releases a reader into parallel spaces of Native culture as diverse as the US-occupied landscapes they embody; the desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes Region, Kansas and Oklahoma, bringing a bit of urban and rural symphony by resisting folds into Americana with courageous unfolding imagery in a serious range of departure. Five debut books present a fistful of furious nature, supple with beauty and brilliance and packing the punch intentional poetry delivers. This is a fearless collection of evocative and challenging verse. Effigies II is a road trip through Indian Country with five American Indian women poets who bring it all back home.

“The Tecumseh Motel traces a parallel path of Shawnee culture and personal history. Spanning from the period of Indian Removal to the present, this text lyrically examines identity, generational memory, and the importance of place.” – LAURA DA

“This book explores the images of the American West. From the neon light of honky tonk barrooms to the Southwestern landscape to the railroad, dirt roads and grandmothers’ living rooms.” – UNGILBAH DAVILA

“A narrative through wrenching spaces in the life of one descendant wrestling with post apocalyptic identity, grounded by persistently supportive ancestors and helpers determined to see their blood survive and resist colonial assimilation through disembodiment” – KRISTI LEORA

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Creek, Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, Irish, English, and Scot ascendants. Raised in North Carolina, the Plains and Canada, she previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories. A fellow of the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Black Earth Institute (emeritus), Salon Ada, and The Center for Great Plains Institute. Laura Da’ is a poet and a public school teacher. The Tecumseh Motel is her first publication. Da’ lives near Seattle with her husband and son. A writer and photographer, Ungelbah Davila, Navajo, Spanish and Irish, is the owner and editor of La Loca Magazine. A native New Mexican, Davila is an alumnus of the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the recent recipient of the National Newspaper Association award for Best Breaking News Story. She resides in Albuquerque with her fiancé Dustin and puppy dogs Oscar and Sprocket. Lara Mann is a native of Kansas, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and a University of Kansas alumnus. She is of English, Irish, Choctaw, French, German, Scottish, Spanish, Cherokee, Welsh, and Mohawk heritage. Mann finished her MFA (Creative Writing) in 2009, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is anticipating the release of he nonfiction 'Indigenous Game Theory,' co-authored with LeAnne Howe. She teaches at Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas. Kateri Menominee (Bay Mills Tribe of Chippewa) received her BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat and in the IAIA Anthologies Radical Enjambment, Birds and Other Omens, and Of Water and Moon. She has been honored with the Truman Capote Trust Scholarship, the N. Scott Momaday Scholarship, and the IAIA scholarship to the Naropa Summer Program.