Award-winning Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist Kenzie Allen gives readers an incredible collection of work in Cloud Missives. With these poems, distributed in five sections, Allen questions what it means to structure an identity in the wake of colonialism's cruelty, while also grappling with finding new ways to heal in a bent and broken world.
The book's title is pulled from the opening poem, "Light Pollution," and in 12 lines sets the tone for the rest of the book with its stark imagery and evocative emotional plea: "We tried to obey, though muffled by order,/ though every scenic outlook was already gone./ We tipped our throats to night showers/ and tried to lick back the stars the city had obliterated,/ to resurrect anything at all by taste,/ their glittering signs and warnings."
The section "Manifest" interrogates and remakes stereotypes driven into popular culture, evoking figures such as Pocahontas, Tiger Lily, and Indiana Jones. She directly addresses the history and legacies that have helped to obliterate Indigenous identities as happens in the poem "A Date with the Ghost of the British Empire," and what it might mean to the dead to be truly returned to where they belong through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), in the poem "Repatriation."
The poems that comprise the section "Pathology" examine language in the fields of forensic anthropology, anthropology, and others, while the "Love Songs" section ends the volume on a warmer, but still poignant note. Allen considers love--romantic love, but also familial and platonic love, and what it might mean to find healing in and from a place of love. Poems such as "When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean" and "Quiet As Thunderbolts" bring light into those intimate spaces that are often kept hidden from others: "And if I wanted it remembered/ the way you asked my skin to sing for you... I can't hold it/ or make it stay, no matter how clever/ my pen."
Allen's probing keenness is further attested to in the endnotes, which address the many references, real and imagined, and crystallize the context for each closely observed poem. Whether savored silently to one's self or recited aloud, shared, and allowed to breathe in the air, these poems will stay with readers long after they have turned the last page. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Kenzie Allen's first volume of poetry is a stunning consideration of constructing identity, finding love, and living life.