Book cover for Whereas

Synopsis

Details

18 April 2019
128 pages
9781529012804
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

In what is clearly a golden age for American poetry, Layli Long Soldier has to be out in front – one of the best collections of the century.

[WHEREAS] reminded me what careful language can do. It made me recommit to writing . . . and made me believe again in the power of writing and the truths that it can reveal for people and what that remembering and honoring the truth can do for the individual, but also for the group, for all of us.

I was blown away by Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS--inspired by its trenchant, beautiful thinking about the relationship between political speech and literature's capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier does, with a sensibility so sure of itself that I find myself simply standing back in admiration.

Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.