A History of Kindness

March 1, 2020
Hogan excavates, ponders, lives, shares, and celebrates her Chickasaw heritage in poetry, fiction, and essays resplendent with her perception of the interconnectivity and wonders of nature, and shadowed by the long traumas engendered by genocidal and ecocidal violence. A teacher and environmentalist whose many awards include a PEN Thoreau Prize, Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth. She writes, I am / merely one brief living shine. She summons roots and bones, water and blood, bison and wolves, eagles and ancestors. Addressing the brutal invaders who attempted to annihilate Native lives and the intricate web of life that sustained them, Hogan observes, the more you took, / the more you lost. She muses: "Yesterday is still today / in our history. Hogan's use of words as vitally dense with time and true history as seeds and stones in syntax woven as gracefully and tightly as willow baskets evokes an aura of hard-won peace as she calls for kindness and attunement: this world all one heartbeat. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)