In this Book
- Leaving Tulsa
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: University of Arizona Press
- Series: Sun Tracks
In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.
In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.
Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-vi
- I. Relic
- Richer Than Anyone in Heaven
- pp. 2-3
- Magdalena in the Desert
- pp. 4-7
- The Outskirts
- p. 8
- Leaving Tulsa
- pp. 9-11
- Pottery Lessons I
- pp. 13-14
- Pottery Lessons II
- pp. 22-23
- II. Before Waking
- Apple of My Eye
- pp. 25-28
- Vanishing Lessons
- pp. 29-30
- Voice Lessons
- pp. 34-35
- Shell Shaker I
- pp. 36-38
- III. Death Rite
- Oklahoma Ice
- p. 40
- Playing House
- pp. 41-42
- The Lost Book
- pp. 47-48
- Mexican Hat, Arizona
- pp. 53-54
- American Coma
- pp. 55-56
- Shell Shaker II
- p. 57
- IV. Vanishing Point
- Tracing Magdalena
- pp. 61-63
- Going West
- p. 64
- Magdalena’s Fire
- pp. 65-66
- Country of Wildfire
- p. 67
- Magdalena’s Passage
- pp. 69-72
- California
- pp. 74-75
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 76-78