Kegedonce Press celebrates our newest poetry collection, D.A. Lockhart’s Go Down Odawa Way.
“Lyric experiences from the rooted-class, steeped in the bloodlines of survival, posed on the verges of decolonization.“
—D.A. Lockhart.
Poems that cross the boundaries of an international border, of urban and natural landscapes, of past and present—Go Down Odawa Way journeys across Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor, ON–Detroit, MI), the southwestern traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy. It is a poetic exploration of the documented villages, history, and mythologies of the Odawa, Ojibway, Huron/Wendat, and Pottawatomi nations that were lost to the process of colonization and relocation.
Yvonne Blomer, editor of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, writes of Go Down Odawa Way:
“In a voice that contains great authority earned through deep understanding of the traditional territories of the Three Fires Confederacy, Daniel Lockhart writes sonnets to water, praise poems to basketball players, and delves into the grimy urban centres where Indigenous histories are conjoined to settler; where braiding has occurred, so ‘this/ lightly-used sport-seated/ pick-up truck is Indigenous/ in ways/ that birchbark canoes/ and flat/ soled moccasins/ never were.’ Lockhart sings to name, praise, and make a record of this ancient and altered water and land, ‘along pressure-treated fences, under salt/ bleached overpasses, each current bubble/ and twirl a constricted muscle twitch.’ And the people who have been forced to witness change, ‘Grandmother rises, / her downward fixed gaze rests/ on the steady tumble/ of coal-fired smoke/ feeding a hundred-thousand air conditioners.’”
Denise Low, author of The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, comments:
“‘There is nothing but the faith and/histories we carry’ writes D. A. Lockhart in Go Down Odawa Way. Lockhart renews concepts of Lenape peoples in living words that move like torrents of springtime rivers. The poems follow trails of water, land, and time. They keep moving—not contained by borders of the pages. They enter into listeners’ own lives. This book has healing power.”
Kegedonce Press is grateful to D.A. Lockhart for participating in this fantastic interview with Open Book in which he discusses stuffed iguanas, shipbreakers and the importance of endings, among other fascinating things…
Don’t miss a chance to view the video book trailer for Go Down Odawa Way, produced by the author.
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