Abigail Chabitnoy

“Room of my own (doors not included). Federal Way, WA.”

Readings

A book by a poet in another genre

Jordan Abel, Nishga (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021)

Griffin Poetry Prize-winning poet Jordan Abel’s newest work, labeled “memoir” but expanding beyond a single genre’s constraints, is especially timely in light of current national and international conversations surrounding Native American residential and boarding schools and the continued aggressions and violences inflicted by colonialism both in Canada and the United States. Abel demands we reconsider the relationship between performer and educator, performative space and educational space directly in a quoted interview within the book, but also in the work itself, its presentation on the page, in the reader’s participation in the work. And of course I say demands in that he simply writes in a manner that is needed to confront the complex legacy of colonization and intergenerational trauma. Through concrete poems and archival materials including notes, interviews, audio transcripts, court records, and more, we are guided through some of Abel’s earlier work and led to consider the larger questions that continue to drive his work. What else do poems do but attempt to arrive at a clearer understanding of the questions that drive us? A good poem doesn’t answer questions: it reveals them to us and in so doing provides new possibilities for how we orient and position ourselves among what knowledge and information we have. And despite the “memoir” label and the clustering of pages thick with prose, I recognize the many and varied manifestations of white space in this work as poetry.

A book in which you were interested by the use of language or form

Sherwin Bitsui, Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

I am inspired by the shift in form from Shewin Bitsui’s first book, Shapeshift, to Flood Song and his most recent, Dissolve, from titled, discreet poems, to a more book-length approach. Though truthfully, one book doesn’t seem capable of containing the poem, which here is not so much a singular unit as something living, breathing, expanding through time and space. I talk to my students about how certain lines and images haunt me, both in the writing process, in my own work, but also as a reader. Echoes that resonate. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been drawn to the fragment, not as something that is incomplete, with an eye to what is missing, but more because that is how I engage with the world—with history, with my heritage, with family, with my surroundings. Pieces that do not need to be made whole so much as they are continually engaged with the work of singing, being, building. Fittingly, the description on the back of Dissolve captures it just so: “characters live in a state of fading and blurring”—but appearing none the less. The work “hums with the coexistence and dissonance of landscape and waste, crisis and continuity.” In a recent discussion with a class on what the lyric is, suggestions were a spiritual communication between writer and reader and a space between mercy and love, between the anticipation of loss and the act of loss. These poems teach us how to dwell in that space between.

A work of fiction

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (Harper, 2017)

I first encountered Louise Erdrich’s work in a college course on federal Indian law and policy. That novel, Round House, illustrated the failure of current jurisdictional divisions to protect indigenous women. Like Round House, Future Home floored me when I first read it. This dystopian thriller considers questions of state and individual agency and bonds of family in a world where women have stopped giving birth. My father could not have known at the time he gifted me this book I was just beginning to seriously consider whether my husband and I would have children, what world they would inherit, how they would relate or not relate to an indigenous heritage fraught with displacement and troubled by modern work and habitation trends, what the ethical responsibilities were for myself to my community, my family, my possible children, etc. (At a recent prenatal visit a nurse asked me what I stress about the most. I asked her how much time she had.) While Future Home certainly did not leave me with any clear reassurance that things would be ok—because of course, such reassurance is not to be had—it helped me frame the questions I was asking, and provided company in their consideration.

A book in which you were interested by the use of narrative or voice

Alice Notley, Alma, or the Dead Women (Granary Books, 2006)

I was first introduced to Alice Notley’s work via Descent of Alette and she has been a literary “auntie” of sorts of mine ever since. I love her blending of the mythic and timeless with the contemporary and real. Her work is unapologetically haunted and haunting and the images and narrative in her work is all the stronger for her command of language and voice. Alma is a cross-genre work, part poem, novel, myth, history, and journal. Situated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is the story of Alma, the true god of this world, who in an interesting twist on the conventional “third eye” shoots heroin through a hole in her forehead. Throughout the book Alma comments on the horrific sequence of events triggered after the attacks, perpetrated by our government and the men of this world who abuse their power and are ruining the world, and through these comments, the author finds an outlet for her own political frustrations and gives voice to her witness of these times. In this way the book demonstrates a deft blend of mythopoeic narrative and relevant commentary on current events, thus demonstrating the potential for poetry to be an act of witness and means of accountability that is useful and necessary in today’s society.

A book of poetry from the past year

Joan Kane, Dark Traffic (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

Full disclosure, I’ve been in love with Joan Kane’s work since her first book. While this may in part be due to the landscapes of her poems, akin to my own homelands, her command of language and the intelligence of her lines are simply stunning. In Dark Traffic especially, Kane sets a scene through her command of pacing and sonic dissonance. If consolation is “the small gesture of sound,” Kane writes defiantly into the wind, the howl, and the dive, weaving both reckoning and conjuring while invoking historical violences not yet redressed. Adam named the world and it was so. And Alice listened. But the world invoked in these poems is older; the names, forgotten and erased, are herein returned by poet, daughter, mother. The poems in Dark Traffic are Joan Kane at her most vulnerable. Oscillating between presence and absence, they fight against disappearance. These poems assume the violence—to person, mother, land—and makes of ruin something to be used.

Writings

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

If you had a dream where someone died
            do you tell them?

             Or do you casually
if unsensationally
ask them if they’ve had their affairs
                   in order?

That is, if your lot is to worry
         stone to sand
                        do you bear it stonily

or remind those you love there are wolves in the woods
            without fur on their sleeves?

 After, I’d made sure all the alarms were in place
            made sure the cat’s small lungs
                      still worked
                                                that I could keep something small
                                   alive.

*

I was woken by two blind crows who’d got their nights mixed
           up or the man upstairs shouting as I do in my sleep,

 desperate to cry blood murder
            but you can’t get enough air
                       and the sound scuttles you

or muffles you—not quite fuzzy, but fur on your tongue
            so you shout again
                                               but because you’re just
                                waking up
           (when you yell)
it still doesn’t sound right
             though now you’ve woken the whole place up
                        or the girl living down below.

**

I heard there were more outcomes to a game of chess
            than there are sand grains or atoms
                         in the universe.

I haven’t decided if that’s true.

THEY’LL ASK YES, BUT WHO IS DYING

when my brothers were awful
the sea again
again
I saw my parents
burn the ground

a decade dead
sweet
fermentation (at) my disposal

the rack
adequate vessel
I built myself an image

able to float

down noticed leaves
branches
close to mine. feather
or fan

common stranger
(at last)
wind—

my grandmother’s hair was longer
and showed some of its old black
her arms not purple
not not purple

black sand
grit
and always

a fear of drowning
a dress like bloat
this stone

pit or
bullet
casing

fruit or
seed or
copse or

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in Poetry. She is a mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing low-residency MFA and adjunct faculty at Eastern Oregon University. She currently lives in Federal Way, WA. Excerpts from her recently published chapbook Converging Lines of Light (https://www.salmonfisherpoet.com/converging-lines-of-light) can be found in Grub Street (Vol. 70) and recent poems have appeared in The Capilano Review, Inner Forest Service (https://www.innerforestservice.com/why), and Inflectionist Review (https://www.inflectionism.com/issue11).

Abigail recommended Michelle Gil-Montero.