In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Leaving Holes & Selected New Writings by Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya
  • Lynette Wise Leidner (bio)
Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya. Leaving Holes & Selected New Writings. Norman: Mongrel Empire P, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-9833052-2-4. 64pp.

Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya is a visual artist and poet. He is tribally affiliated with the Yuchi and Comanche tribes of Oklahoma. His first published book, Leaving Holes & Selected New Writings, has a history as interesting as the poems and stories it contains. In 1992 the original manuscript was selected as co-winner for the very first (then called) Diane Decorah Memorial Award for Poetry, today known as the Native Writer’s Circle of America’s First Book Award for Poetry. As Native scholar Geary Hobson explains in a foreword to Leaving Holes, the small press that had originally planned to publish this award-winning manuscript shut down before the project could be completed, regrettably leaving this remarkable work unpublished for nineteen years. Finally in 2011 the project was picked up by Mongrel Empire Press of Norman, Oklahoma. What should have rightfully happened nearly two decades ago has finally seen fruition, and this deserving work is now in print. This past April, shortly after its release, Leaving Holes was awarded the prestigious 2012 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry, further confirmation of the superior and timeless quality of Nevaquaya’s work. We have waited a long time to get this two-time award-winning book in our hands, and now we can say that it has been well worth the wait.

Nevaquaya is a true master of words. With his words he paints vivid, stark, cutting images that defy deconstruction, words that haunt the periphery of our consciousness long after their reading. The topography of the book invites a rigorous navigation, its divisions marked by abrupt shifts in styles and content. This is due largely to the span of time and human experience that these poems have witnessed in the last two decades: their voices reflect the life of the poet—his struggles, his pain, his endurance.

The first section of the book comprises the complete works from the 1992 manuscript. It includes poems that are defiantly abstract, yet organically tangible. Mary E. “Sass” White, in the introduction to Leaving [End Page 115] Holes, describes it best: “Like the skin of my own flesh, I know what his words feel like to the touch” (xi). Though many of these poems are written with an opaqueness that resists explication, they are excitingly powerful, eliciting an emotional reaction that can only be felt, not described. Their voices are broken and raw, wrapped in ancient longing and memory. These are poems that one must experience, not force into explanation. For example, in the poem “Fear and Passing”:

Unfolding the drops of salt and silent blood sprinkled around the spaces of sleep, widows weep in rage of the sea metallic tears in sharkskins of envelopes, and snatch down these moments of breathlessness and naked drownings.

(7–12)

Also included among the first section is a grouping of poems referred to as “Poems for those remembered.” These are short honor poems, titled for the particular individuals to whom they are addressed. For example:

Poem for Pamela White Thunder An ancient dragonfly hovers inside the mirror, remembering a favored child is tasting rain with a new tongue.

(32)

These poems are both private and revealing; reading them feels like peering briefly into a secret window to the soul of the poet.

The second section of Leaving Holes consists of Nevaquaya’s “Selected New Writings” and includes a collection of short prose “letters” entitled “Hizzoner, The Mayor of Red Wasp.” Each letter begins with “Notes from the Desk of the Mayor over to Red Wasp,” followed by an often lively report of the strange and recent “going-ons” in a small town dying a slow, but imminent death: “There’s just a handful of us left here in town, and a few old timers out past the single amber light blinking in all kinds of weather; hell even the drunks have died off, the ones that used to sleep in the abandoned ball field, where there hasn’t been no happy...

pdf