Severalty Volume 98

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, an American Book Award winner, and Instruments of the True Measure, a Washington State Book Award winner.

“In Severalty, Laura Da’ has rendered an unimaginably brilliant creation. She achieves the furthest reaches of the lyric’s capacity for resurrective stitchery, restoring the quartered body to wholeness and the land to paradise. This is a holy text, with the power to reveal and heal. I am in awe.”—Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets “The growing oeuvre from Laura Da’ continues to astonish. With Severalty, she casts her ‘earth-slung eye’ to the deep roots of Indigenous history, culture, and identity. These pages are scarred with violence, allotment, and surgery. At the same time, these poems cast and stitch seeds, offering medicine and sustenance.”—Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [Åmot] “In this riveting new collection, Laura Da’ braids the Shawnee history of allotment with personal history, and her ‘stitches are as many’ and as various ‘as any primer.’ Here ‘Q is the needle’s threaded eye’ and ‘Z . . . a tight flourish across the page, precarious ink edge of survival.’”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines “In Severalty, Laura Da’ is transfixed by the hidden history of our Native landscape. She has a huge armory of voices to draw upon to realize this vision. Her poetry is so exacting and vibrant as to transfigure time. She seems to escape its restraints again and again. Her deftly arranged serial poems maintain the presence and precise weight of sculpture. Are these poems in fact ceremonial objects? A fully attenuated and syllabic rendering of ‘nature’ is being offered here. This book is a multidimensional act of reclamation.”—Cedar Sigo, author of Siren of Atlantis “Though the title of this haunting collection alludes to the act of separating—Native communal land holdings, the continuum of time—the poems ‘ripen outside the hours and beyond the map.’ Here, history and family stories overlap; here historical trauma leads to contemporary illness. Ultimately, Da’ employs the Shawnee understanding of the verb garden as ‘tenderly rupturing,’ to enact an alchemy in which the reader, like the author, may be ‘tilled by memory / . . . sown and cultivated / back from the brink.’ Read these poems, let the ‘untranslatable’ seeds fill you.”—Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light “In Severalty, Laura Da’ brilliantly explores territorial, historical, and personal notions of separation. The poems in this insightful, candid, and revelatory collection weave the present and the past, the personal and the political, and the legal and the communal into a stunning poetic tapestry. This is a book of visions, interrogations, memory, hope, and guidance. It is a necessary book.”—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry “Laura Da’ dives yet more deeply to examine body, land, community over time, contrasting perspectives from classical Western culture with her Shawnee world. Vulnerable after general anesthesia, Da’ returns to Self ‘Mistaken for a gardener upon my return’ that leads her to ponder resurrection and what is essential. She conjures her people’s journey downriver from Chillicothe to Oklahoma and back to the Snoqualmie Valley watershed through interlocking poems that analyze erasure, even as they celebrate life. The sharp, apt images that surface will take your breath again and again.”—Ruby Hansen Murray, Osage News