Texas... to Get Horses

Kimberly Wieser takes us on an expansive journey across mixedblood Indian Americana in this collection of poetry. Home is a place where our surroundings are familiar, an embodiment of one’s very own being. It represents a sacred place for healing. 

“Na he dum—Cheyenne for ‘I’m telling the truth’—is the phrase that lingers after reading Kimberly Wieser's no-holds-barred roaring whirlwind of a collection. This is the poetry of a woman, unabashed and unafraid, speaking from her whole mind and whole heart, emphatically declaring, here is the truth of my history, my people, my family, my body, my sex, my languages, my being, my very spirit. Written with unflinching eyes, this is work without hesitation or doubt, that refuses suffering and victimization, that celebrates survival and memory.” 
—ire'ne lara silva, author of Flesh to Bone and Blood Sugar Cantos 


Prof. Kimberly Wieser is an Associate Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She serves as Undergraduate Director for the English Department and directs activities at OU for Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She is the author of Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies (part of the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; winner of the Louis Little Coon Oliver First Book Award for Prose 2004) published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017. Under her previous name, Kimberly Roppolo, she was one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (Oklahoma, 2008), named one of the most important books in her field in the first decade of the twenty-first century by NAISA. Her poetry collection Texas . . . to Get Horses was published by That Painted Horse Press in 2018.

Deer Trails by Kim Shuck

Deer Trails is a strongly elegiac evocation of a San Francisco that lies buried under its contemporary urban landscape, but can still be found peeking through. Native American and native San Franciscan Kim Shuck is the city's seventh poet laureate, and in these poems she celebrates the enduring presence of indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification, urbanization, and the erasure of memory. www.kimshuck.com

Deer Trails San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7 Kim Shuck 

Trickster Story

by Jenny L. Davis

I’m going to tell you 
a story about why the 
Tricksters no longer 
talk to each other. 
They say long ago 
that the animals used 
to talk together, just 
like people do today. 
One day, Rabbit, 
Coyote, Raven, 
Spider, Buzzard 
and Fox all took 
seats around 
a table together 
for the first time 
in a long while 
eying each other warily. 
Finally, Fox cleared 
her throat and said, 
Thanks for coming— 
As you know, 
the point of today’s 
faculty meeting 
is to decide who 
among us gets a 
merit raise this year. 

Trickster Story appears in the Fall 2019 issue of North Dakota Quarterly 
© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved. 

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous writer and professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology. Her creative work has been featured in literary journals including the Santa Ana River Review; Transmotion; Anomaly; Broadsided; and as well as anthologies such as As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. 

Author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance uapress.arizona.edu/book/talking-indian