Through a Red Place by Rebecca Pelky

Through a Red Place by Rebecca Pelky

An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, THROUGH A RED PLACE builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.

Rebecca Pelky's story-in-poems assembles the author's research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin. Through the poet's ancestors--and documented through text and image--this book relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways. Written in English and Mohegan, THROUGH A RED PLACE reshapes itself from page to page, asking what it means to navigate place as both colonizer and colonized. These poems seek the interior and exterior lives of beloved people and places, interacting with archives and visuals to illustrate that what is past continually interrupts and reinscribes itself upon the present. This collection embodies a refusal to go missing despite what's buried, erased, or built over, much like the ancient mound now covered by an ammunition plant. An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, THROUGH A RED PLACE builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.

Poetry. Native American Studies. Women's Studies.