Deer Trails

Kim Shuck is an Ani Yun Wiya (Cherokee)/Polish-American poet, author, weaver, and bead-work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making. She is the winner of the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas and the Mary Tallmountain Award for Freedom Voices. In 2017, she was named the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Her newest book, Deer Trails, was published by City Lights in summer 2019. She is also one of 13 recipients of the Academy of American Poets inaugural Poets Laureate Fellowships.

"Love song and lament in equal measure, Kim Shuck's collection Deer Trails is an intimate and evocative portrait of San Francisco, a city in frenetic flux. A member of the Cherokee Nation, a native of San Francisco, and the city’s seventh poet laureate, Shuck crafts poems haunted by loss and dispossession yet imbued with hope. The acts of attention and observation in this sequence peel back the surface of the city, laying bare its uneasy present and its unsettled past. Shuck, an accomplished beadwork artist and weaver, is also a master of poetic form; the imagery in her stacked, enjambed, and interwoven lines is deft, dramatic, and always finely wrought. Like 'little blue butterflies,' these poems have 'thumbnail wings.' Their flight reminds us that what is sacred in San Francisco cannot be possessed."—Heidi Van Horn, Alta California"While [Kim Shuck's] graceful poetry can be nuanced, her opening prose is a direct reminder of what the city stands on, and why it matters. Deer Trails begins with her inaugural speech, delivered at San Francisco's Main Library. … Shuck’s own sound is often gentle on the ear, and blessedly strong."—The Rumpus"Kim Shuck's serpentine lyrics sing the streets, hills, trees, fog, and rain of San Francisco, as well as the city's deeper cartography of watersheds, village sites, shellmounds, trade paths, and deer trails. As you navigate this book, listen closely: the poems transform into maps, prayers, and medicine that offer healing, wonderment, and joy in our difficult times. 'Travel grateful,' the poet lovingly advises. 'Travel safe.'"—Craig Santos Perez"Deer Trails is a work of maturity and passion from one of Native America's best poets. Kim Shuck is a poet whose dedication to indigenous reality is unquestionable and admirable. The Tsalagi people live in a cherished memory of honor and peace. The poems in Deer Trails are a testament to these ends. I am proud to call her sister."—Lance Henson"Made of leaps of beginning after beginning of images that sound as well as visually show nature's humanity in a montage—naming en route to organic epiphanies—that's the idiomatic brilliance of Kim Shuck's actually quite sophisticated poems of simplicity."—Jack Hirschman"Shuck's poetry reminds us that you can believe in the blue note; our elders' speeches that we dance near. Her poems seamlessly walk the aggregates of human presence and voice all of nature’s directions. Shuck reminds us of the omniscience of the people in this dictatorship of dimes; the omniscience of the people in all sketches about genocide. Hers is the only way to look at San Francisco. A prayer in the mind of a warrior."—Tongo Eisen-Martin“What Kim Shuck is writing is vital and vibrant. She is blending tradition with modernity, history with humor and her own Indigenous perspective with everything else. She is kind enough to invite us all into her mind, her life and her tribe through her writing and to smile at us when we realize that we are glad we came, glad we read this evocative book and glad that we met this powerful and significant poet.” —Dr. Dawn Karima Pettigrew