Something Small of How to See a River - Paperback

by Teresa Dzieglewicz (Author)

Through the weaving of documentary poetics, first-hand accounts, dialogue, and lyric, these poems tell the story of co-running a school at the Ocethi Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock.

Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us and our environment, how whiteness fails to hold itself accountable, how future generations and the land are being failed--and how, in the face of all this, the Standing Rock movement was not a failure. At the heart of this collection is the strength, care, and radical joy of the movement, which shines through and against the violence.

Author Biography

Teresa Dzieglewicz is an educator, poet, and part of the founding team of the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčiziŋ Wóuŋspe (Defenders of the Water School) on the Standing Rock Reservation. She was named a Best New Poet of 2018, as well as the winner of the 2018 Auburn Witness Prize, a 2018 Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Palette Poetry Prize. Dzieglewicz has been a fellow at New Harmony Writers Workshop, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the NY Mills Arts Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she was recognized with an Academy of American Poets Prize.