Bøker av Denise Low

Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier's Whereas and Simon Ortiz's from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples' experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations. In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low's formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing. Ultimately, these poems not only reconstruct an important historical event, but they also put pressure on the gaps, silences, and violence of the archive. Low asks readers to question not only what is remembered, but how history is remembered--and who is forgotten from it. Reflecting on the injustice of the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh lamented that though "the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus . . . no American ever was punished, not one." These poems challenge this attempted erasure.

Denise Low recovers the life and times of her grandfather Frank Bruner (1889–1963), whose expression of Lenape identity was largely discouraged by mainstream society.

Writer of poetry, essays, memoir, and fiction-Denise Low did what so many of us did in the spring of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic sent us to spend long days at home. Denise's jigsaw puzzling went well beyond pictures put together piece-by-piece, however. The 15 essays in this book document the pestilence that impacted our entire world. In them, Low explores the very culture of jigsaw puzzles while providing poetic lessons in art, geography, history, and more."I never underestimate the power of a single puzzle piece. It fits within a whole, like each moment of my unfolding life story." -Denise Low

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors presents Dodge City ledger-art images and biographies that document a Native perspective at the cusp of reservation life in 1879.

NATURAL THEOLOGIES: ESSAYS ABOUT LITERATURE OF THE NEW MIDDLE WEST is the first critical study of contemporary Mid-Plains literature. Denise Low shows how the region''s writers inherit a Frontier legacy from Indigenous and American settler communities. Myths continue to provide framework for fiction writers and poets, as well as nature and the rich community life. Not all of the region is rural. Cities like Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City, have presence in the literature—but in context of the great acreage around them. This innovative book defines the region''s character while, at the same time, illuminating a panoramic past. Indigenous peoples and their philosophies add to this unique look at the Mid-continent''s literary culture.

Grandchildren meet their grandparents at the end, Denise Low says, as tragic figures. We remember their decline and deaths.... The story we see as grandchildren is like a garden covered by snow, just outlines visible. Low brings to light deeply held secrets of Native ancestry as she recovers the life story of her Kansas grandfather, Frank Bruner (1889-1963).