The Music of Her Rivers
The Music of Her Rivers pays homage to the rivers that taught the poet--the Rio Grande and the Chicago and Illinois Rivers. Sharp-eyed and empathetic, Golden serves as a witness, documenting place, history, and people, especially those left voiceless due to violence or discrimination--from the refugee border crossers of the Rio Grande to the Irish immigrants and former slaves struggling to build lives in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each poem captures the enduring challenges of Native peoples, laborers, naturalists, and immigrants through its haunting and consuming verse. Throughout the collection the nuanced representation of the landscape allows the rivers to become witnesses and actors themselves.
These are poems of lyric beauty and also of masterful storytelling. Golden is able to compress a novel's worth of living into a few crystal-clear lines.'--Chloe Martinez, RHINO Poetry
A collection of luminous poems about hardscrabble lives.'--Chicago Tribune
Golden provides a fuller, more nuanced history of various social issues with craft and concern laced together by the tributaries that wind through Mexico and Chicago.'--Newcity Lit
[A] gathering of radiant poems about lives on the hard edge of America.'--Third Coast Review
Her rivers are urgent witnesses; her rivers sing truths, shimmer in the darkness. Here are songs pure as water to nourish and cleanse us in the season of lies.'--Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
Renny Golden is an activist and award-winning author. Her book Blood Desert: Witnesses, 1820-1880 (UNM Press) won the WILLA Literary Award for poetry in 2011, was named a Southwest Notable Book of the Year in 2012, and was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.
Rio Grande
Praise
The Chama and the Benedictines
Passengers
Meinrad's Call
Dream of the One-Footed
They Named Me Wolf
Dark River, Light Falling
God's Map: A Sonnet Crown
Like a Door Flung Open
Gamblers
Lament
The Angel of Tenosique
Migrations
Last Blessing
Ná Géill, Nunca Abdicación (Never Surrender)
Boy Heroes of Mexico
Vows
Por Que? Why?
Lost Dog
Tony and the Rio Grande
Without a Compass
Chicago--Illinois Rivers
The Question
The Leap
Travelers
Magicians
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Lambs of God
Fouled
Angels of the River
Sestina for a River
Jacques Marquette's Canticle
Chief Shabbona's Vision
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's Patience
What do we know of the laws and customs of white people?
Union Stockyards
I, Lucy Parsons, Am Still a Rebel
White City
SS Eastland Capsizes in the Chicago River
A Line Breaking: 1919 Riots
Steel Mills
Where the River Goes Mexican
Philosophy Majors
Baptism
Blood Red
There Is No Deal
Carp at the Gates
In Spite of Debris, Offal, Trash, Detritus
What the River Said
Acknowledgments
Notes--Timeline
