Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generations

The ancestors that walk with us, sing us our song. When we get quiet enough, we can hear them sing and make them audible to people today. In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon, a member of the White Earth Nation, summons those ancestors' songs, and so begins the dream singing for generations yet to come. "The Anishinaabe heard stories in their dream songs," Ojibwe author Gerald Vizenor wrote, and like those stories once inscribed in pictographs on birch-bark scrolls, Rendon's poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations.

Through dream-songs and poem-songs responding to works of theater, choral music, and opera, Rendon brings memory to life, the senses to attention-to see the moonbeams blossoming on the windowsill, to feel the hold of the earth, to hear the echo of grandmother's breath, to lie on the bones of ancestors and feel the rhythms of silence running deep. Her singing, breaking the boundaries that time would impose, carries the Anishinaabe way of life and way of seeing forward in the world.

About the Author

Marcie R. Rendon, White Earth Ojibwe, was included on Oprah's 2020 list of thirty-one Native American authors to read. She has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Cash Blackbear mystery series, the third volume of which, Sinister Graves, was a 2023 Minnesota Book Award Finalist. In 2020, she received Minnesota's McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, and in 2017, Rendon, with poet Diego Vazquez, received the Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with incarcerated women in the county jail system.

Reviews

"Marcie R. Rendon gifts us with a meditative journey pulsing with the rhythms of life in Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium. Her moving words are lyrical and powerful, and they touch our 'aloneness' with vivid, beautiful images that carry dreams in song-connections with those who came before and are yet to come."-Gwen Nell Westerman, Poet Laureate of Minnesota

"Marcie Rendon is tired, too. But not too tired to do the hard labor of loving other human beings, and the earth, and the songs of her ancestors. As a fellow poet from the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, I could say that this collection is essential to the complicated song that is Minnesota, and that would be true, but also everyone, everywhere, needs to spend time with this book and find their own way to sing along with it or sit quietly and listen deeply to its songs."-Bao Phi, author of A Different Pond and Thousand Star Hotel

"This collection undoubtedly sings through and for generations to come! These powerful poems ask us to trust the wind to catch and carry our songs and prayers. Through each page, Marcie R. Rendon guides us to radically dream a future of strength and reminds us that 'Win or lose, there's dancing to be done.'"-Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love

"Rendon summoned the voices of the Anishinaabe ancestors, and our future generations will hear the songs. The stories emblazoned as pictographs on birchbark scrolls are now celebrated in this well-written collection of dream and performance poems or songs. "-UP Book Review

"White Earth Nation author Rendon records and refreshes the dream music of her people in this collection of 'poem-songs.'. . . [Rendon] contributes powerfully timeless lyrics to the English-speaking world's record of Amerindian verse."-Booklist

"Rendon's powerful poems speak layers of truth about the Ojibwe people's remarkable resilience in surviving the violence of colonization, caring for the land, and kindling the wishes and prayers of generations yet to come, a testament to their collective strength and endurance."-Colors of Influence

"Sometimes the words are beautiful, serious, and worth slowing down for; other times they dance off the page."-The Circle

"This short volume of work that [Rendon] divides into Dream Songs and Performance Song exemplifies her mastery of the written word while embodying the rhythms and music of oral traditions and evoking the imagery of Anishinaabe culture."-Lake Superior Magazine

"The repetitions and rhymes draw attention to the musicality of these pieces written through Anishinaabe oral and aural literacies. This musicality transforms the experience of reading as these pieces are shared amongst the writer-singer and reader-listener as a drumbeat might, or a heartbeat might. They invoke an increased attuning to one's interconnectedness with the worlds in and around us."-Wasafiri

"With vivid sensory detail and rhythmic lyricism, Rendon faithfully depicts the concerns of today's and tomorrow's indigenous poets."-Electric Literature

Book Information
ISBN 9781517917432
Author Marcie R. Rendon
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Weight(grams) 99g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 5mm