Bone Light

Orlando White

Publication Year: 2009

In Bone Light, Orlando White's debut volume, he explores the English language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective. He invites us to imagine that we, as a people—all people in this imaginary country called the United States—are speaking an Indigenous language and that the English language exists merely as a remnant of the colonial past. Despite its tenuous existence in this re-imagined present, English remains a danger to Indigenous thought, as it threatens to impose an alien worldview through its vocabulary and syntactical maneuvers. Historically, English was used by non-Natives to document Indigenous cultures; against this historical backdrop, White also writes to document, but he works to create something more beautiful than harmful. He does not attempt a critique of the English language; he works with it and against it to gain a better understanding of its peculiarities and limits, creating a relationship through these sometimes humorous, sometimes irreverent acts of exploration. Throughout Bone Light, Orlando White approaches the English language as if he has just encountered it, as if it were a mysterious set of symbols. Focusing on the particles of the language, the punctuation marks, the letters, the spaces between words, he turns them a while in his hand like strange inexplicable artifacts from a lost world, then sets to work, refashioning them into something he can use.

Published by: Red Hen Press

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Book Details

E-ISBN-13: 9781597093781
Print-ISBN-13: 9781597091350
Print-ISBN-10: 1597091359

Page Count: 64
Publication Year: 2009

Edition: First

Bone Light

Frontispiece

Title Page, Copyright, Acknowledgments, Dedication

Contents

To See Letters

Sentence

The i is a Cricket

Bone Light

Fill in the Blank

Ats’íísts’in

Light Bulb Eye

Dissolve

Circle Shape

Open Dark

Bleach Ink

Human Clock

From Skin to Bone

Blank Circle

On the Zero’s Eye

Skin of a Letter

Skeleton

Square Lips

Imperative

Images of Myself

Bone Milk

Blank Skull

Analogy

Lower Case i and j

i Without j

i Next to j

i-j

Ars Poetica

Discourse

Dot Fly

Meditation

Quietus

Writ

Research Areas

Recommend

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