Rose Quartz: Poems

From the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes and author of the well-regarded memoir Red, LaPointe opens her plangent first collection with poems assaying language as a means of mending a self splintered between cultures (“teach me a word/ better than survivor”), then builds like a storm to bright, colliding lines capturing that duality and its price. “I learned to sever head from heart/ dunked my head beneath water/ that was no longer there,” she says as she travels through a hardened coming of age (when she “learns loneliness”), male violence (“The men in cars have changed into wolves”), and white oppression (the “weight and meat and muscle” pressing against her comes from a Viking with “yellow hair falling”). She longs for escape (“I am looking for something other than the glow of headlights”), yet knows she’s misplaced a part of herself (“trapped…up…and emptied…into a bell jar”) and indeed her very sense of identity (“the wool blankets weren’t/ good enough// for me to be a real/ Indian”). Fairytale imagery pervades, from Hansel and Gretel to Snow White, but LaPointe has also found her own, closer-to-home rituals for protection.