Apprenticed to Justice

Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this ¿strange map drawn of blood and history.¿ It opens with intriguing glimpses of individuals¿a mother ¿born of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,¿ cousins ¿who rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,¿ women ¿planting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabi¿¿and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry.Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to t