Jacklight
A poetry collection from Louise Erdrich, winner of America’s prestigious National Book Award for Fiction, 2012
The poems of Louise Erdrich eloquently and passionately bring to life what it is to be a woman, a Midwesterner, and a Native American. She presents that region and those people without sentimentality but with a powerful magic. Although she often draws from a deep enchanted well, she does not ignore the ordinary.
One sequence of poems presents a small town in the early part of this century and Mary Krõger, the butcher’s widow. Mary lives within the shadows of her memories, the pulse of her desires and the pragmatic surface of her commonplace days in the centre of a town awash with gossip, commerce and lust.
Other poems draw from images so ripe they become myth, signs and directions the visible world offers up in its great repetitions. Louise Erdrich writes with conviction and vision; her poetry speaks with a clarity and strength we cannot ignore.
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.