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"And whereas one of my students asks a visiting poet about education vaguely getting at what is worth pursuing? The poet suggests looking at whatever is/was missing in one's life and begin there. So many nods in the room around that table they acknowledge it too. In the missing power" (p. 67)

"Yet I smash head-on into this specific differentiation: *the* Creator vs. *their* Creator. Whereas this alters my concern entirely--how do I language a collision arrived at through separation?"

Those quotes point to the central concerns of Layli Long Soldier's truly exceptional first volume of poetry. Writing from her positions on Lakota land--linguistic, geographical, historical, political--she crafts languages and silences that address the various dispossessions of her people's (and Native people's generally) experience. The long title sequence provides a blistering indictment of the rhetorical evasions and fundamental emptiness of Obama's "apology" (there's no equivalent word in Lakoa) for...just what, isn't clear. Long Soldier excoriates our standard rhetoric of "both sides" were at fault and refuses to look away from the impact of the continuing US refusal to do anything meaningful in response to the crisis conditions on reservations, rural and urban.

There's quite a bit of self-reflexive meditation on the role of the poet and not all of it works well for me, especially the continuing experiments with the shape of words on the page. Some of those do work, however, notably the one where she points to the "white holes," the empty spaces left in typesetting, which stand in for the silences and elisions of historical documents.

Should be read, soon, my anyone interested in contemporary poetry, Native life, and/or the moral condition of the/our nation.