Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature ed. by Qwo-Li Driskill et al. (review)

Sovereign Erotics is the first collection published by a university press to solely feature creative literature written by two-spirit peoples. Making appropriate and exciting individual selections across literary genres, genders, communities, and nations, editors Driskill, Justice, Miranda, and Tatonetti offer an original diversity of prose and poetry from established and newly established writers who self-identify as both Native and LGBTQ2 (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, or two-spirited). About half the content is new; only twenty-six of the sixty-one creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction selections are previously published, mainly in single-author books. This new anthology's contemporary writings mostly reference queer and Native themes. By offering cutting-edge two-spirit insights and aesthetics, the collection will make Native LGBTQ2 writers more accessible to their nations, to their gendered communities, and to academic and popular audiences.

In the introduction, "Writing in the Present," the editors take care to define the complex title components "sovereign erotics" and "two-spirit" within an evolving 1970s-2000s proliferation of queer Native writings, movements, nations, identities, and women-of-color feminisms. Despite this insightful context, the Sovereign Erotics introduction does not describe in much detail what the collection actually contributes in content internally and comparatively across the literary field. It does offer a brief, four-fold "gentle guide" of "Dreams/Ancestors," "Love/Medicine," "Long/Walks," and "Wild/Flowers" that thematically cobbles together the fourteen to twenty-four freely associated works within each section (8). This review builds upon that guide and makes some comparative analyses between the 2011 Sovereign Erotics and the landmark 1988 publication of Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, the only previous anthology to specifically focus on writings by gay Indian/two-spirit peoples.

The first section, "Dreams/Ancestors," features themes of linked historical and contemporary realities, traumas, and musings inflected by queer Native erotics. The late Paula Gunn Allen's dyke-centered poem "Some Like Indians Endure" that began Living the Spirit also begins Sovereign Erotics, but the exact repetition across those anthologies stops there. Janice Gould (Concow), who was published in Living the Spirit, makes new contributions with her 2011 poem "Indian Mascot" and makes the astonishing conclusion:

. . . Little do we know this fallliving Indians at Feather Fallsleave tobacco to mark that, indeed,we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.

(56)

Craig Womack's excellent second chapter of his 2001 Drowning in Fire: A Novel, "King of the Tie-Snakes," intertwines his traditional Muskogee Creek Nation's stories with contemporary identities, recounting the Creek protagonist's longings for another Creek boy despite the colonial, homophobic attacks such desire now merits in the Creek Nation. From a younger perspective, Joel Waters's (Oglala Lakota) "Kid Icarus" poem ironically offers a fresh look at the Sioux "heaven" of homoerotic yearnings for a fellow Pine Ridge man intoxicated by silver "spray paint" (28). Also intent on re-creating ancient myths, Mi'kmaq/Acadian artist Louis Esmé Cruz reworks bear narratives in an unusual transgender arc in "Birthsong for Muin, in Red." It is one of many times old traditions cleverly recycle into the timeless present, lived anew as contemporary experience.

Comparative readings within the anthology itself offer benefits and minor drawbacks. The smattering of authors who appear isolated one to five times in the book may prompt readers to seek out authors' broader literary and cultural contexts and their complete writings. The companion 2011 University of Arizona publication Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature edited by Qwo-Li Driskill et al. is a rewarding place to begin searching for a general literary context beyond the brief author biographies located at the conclusion of Sovereign Erotics. While Craig Womack's aforementioned second chapter only begins to develop the queer romance that intensifies in the last chapters of the full...