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While performance seems to suit the strengths of most modern poets�� works, Layli Long Soldier’s poetry is harder to separate from the page—which doesn’t mean that it rests there comfortably. Quite the contrary. Midway through WHEREAS (2017), her debut collection and a National Book Award finalist, the speaker states, “I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.�� The declaration is noteworthy because, up to this point in the book, as an epigraph announces, Long Soldier shows little inclination to mind the rules:

Now
make room in the mouth
for grassesgrassesgrasses

The language of WHEREAS enacts the struggle of its project: the sheer weight of representing an “I�� that is both a self and a part of a highly diverse collective—American Indians—whose identity has largely been imposed from without. For Long Soldier, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe and a visual artist who has taught at Diné College, in the Navajo Nation, syntax itself strains and cracks under the burden.

The vow to compose sentences with care comes from ��38,�� a five-page poem that acts as a fulcrum between the shorter poems in the book’s first section and the longer “Whereas Statements�� of the book’s second and final section. ��38�� is an account of the largest “legal�� execution in U.S. history: 38 Sioux prisoners hanged, with President Abraham Lincoln’s approval, following the 1862 Sioux Uprising. The poem builds force with stark, declarative sentences, each standing as a stanza or paragraph on its own.

The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.

This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week�� for emphasis.

The Sioux fought because they were starving: They hadn’t received the payments agreed to in treaties with the U.S. government, they had lost their hunting grounds, and local traders refused to extend them credit to buy food. One of the traders was supposed to have said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.�� After a raid by Sioux warriors, this trader’s body was found with his mouth stuffed with grass. Some might call this poetic justice. Long Soldier goes further:

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

There’s irony in their poem.

There was no text.

“Real�� poems do not “really�� require words.

Then she reconsiders: After all, the trader’s words initiate the poem, “click the gears of the poem into place.�� It’s telling that even in the most straightforward portion of the book, Long Soldier deploys language to mark its own limits, to probe its utility, to take its measure against concrete and tangible actions.

Long Soldier’s fitful, yearning relationship to the language of her father and older relatives—her palpable “ache of being language poor�� when it comes to Lakota—embodies that sense of inadequacy, of constantly reaching and failing to connect or express. “I climb the backs of languages,�� she writes, “ride them into exhaustion—maybe I pull the reins when I mean go.�� Because even with Long Soldier’s rich command of it, English is a fraught instrument for exploring the dark legacies of the U.S. and the Sioux’s shared history, which Long Soldier, as a dual citizen, is heir to. Her visual artistry at work, she avails herself of the spatial elements of text—ellipses, disjunction, concrete poetry, blank space—to convey uncertainty and instability. This grasping at the elusiveness of sense-making can be thrilling, but it demands that the reader weather discomfort, abstraction, and incompleteness—and not flinch from asking, with Long Soldier, about the whole endeavor: Is poetry up to the task?

For Long Soldier, language and the body are not really separable. Apology is at the heart of the book, and physical gesture is at the heart of apology. As she tells us, “In many Native languages, there is no word for ‘apologize.�� The same goes for ‘sorry,’ �� yet there are ways to admit error and make amends. The title, WHEREAS, comes from the careful, official language of a federal apology to American Indians—a series of toothless “whereas�� clauses in a Senate resolution that was later cut to half a page and tucked into a defense appropriations bill, signed by President Barack Obama one December weekend in 2009, with no announcement and no tribal representatives present. The U.S. government’s apology to American Indians is almost the definition of an empty gesture.

Long Soldier sets this in contrast to a quiet moment with her estranged father over breakfast in her kitchen. A little sound escapes him, and then: “He pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes. He wiped.�� What seems at first to the speaker like a sneeze is an almost-silent sob—a prelude to words of remorse for decades of absence and inattention. “WHEREAS when offered an apology,�� Long Soldier writes:

I watch each movement the shoulders
high or folding, tilt of the head both eyes down or straight through
me, I listen for cracks in knuckles or in the word choice, what is it
that I want? To feel and mind you I feel from the senses—I read
each muscle, I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem.

A nation cannot pinch its fingers to the bridge of its nose, but there are ways of giving flesh to language. Long Soldier’s lyric “I,�� at once fractured and centered within its fissures, attempts a poetry that can bear grief and make something new—just as the poet wishes that her young daughter, learning Lakota and Navajo and beginning to appreciate the fragments that make up her identity, may someday come to understand “wholeness for / what it is, not for what it’s not, all of it / the pieces;��

This poetry collection will put off many people. It is not easy to get into, since Long Soldier demands your full attention. You cannot sleep on her words, you have to be on guard, give her your all. The way she plays so masterfully with language made my little linguistic heart full to bursting. Sure, some of the poems are more on the experimental side and it's hard to really understand them if you're not in Long Soldier's shoes, but she guides you along with her own expertise, offers you a helping hand in understanding where she is coming from, explains why she writes in that particular way.

The treatment of Native communities by the US government and US citizens is appalling. Their ignorance is infuriating. Their audacity is disgusting. I am incredibly grateful that a poetry collection like WHEREAS exists, in which a woman gives voice to her people (and people who have suffered comparable atrocities) and demands better from a government / a country / a people who have forcibly taken a land that rightfully wasn't theirs and can't seem to own up to it ... even centuries later.