America the Beautiful

These poems, written in the last decade of Paula Gunn Allen's life and the first years of the new century, capture the variety, ingenuity, and complexity of this beloved and influential Native American critic and poet. In the lexicon of Paula Gunn Allen, what makes America beautiful may come as a surprise: its horrors confront its hopefulness; its absurdities challenge its promise. A powerful, sustained lyrical and narrative sequence written in the midst of political and personal catastrophe (the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, a disastrous home fire, her own battle with lung cancer), Allen's last book of poems is at once a bonfire made up of the ruins of civilization, a call for one more effort to set things right, and a gift to us all from this fertile and generous writer.