National Monuments

2009 Minnesota Book Awards Winner for Poetry. "Erdrich's poems are beautiful and brave explorations of the depths of national identities and the real people who live them...these are poems I loved reading." - Robert Warrior, Director, University of Illinois American Indian Studies and the Native American House Deeply observant poems from a Native American poet with a wry sense of humor: Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent. As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into won