You and I, and Spilyáy - Paperback

by Kara Briggs (Author)

In You and I, and Spilyáy, Kara Briggs writes from the living ground of memory: family, ceremony, salmon, forests, rivers, and the many relations that join human life to the land. A Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Citizen and direct Yakama descendant, Briggs brings clear-eyed tenderness and moral urgency to poems shaped by Native history, inheritance, love, loss, and renewal.

The collection moves from childhood amid the Civil Rights era to ancestral stories, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, and the Pacific Northwest's daily beauty. At its center is Spilyáy, the Yakama trickster-teacher, fool, and keeper of lessons about how people might care for one another and the earth. Against present-day forces that endanger salmon, water, and sacred places, these poems ask what it means to remember rightly, to grieve, and to remain answerable to the future.

Both intimate and communal, You and I, and Spilyáy is a gathering of witness and praise: an invitation to listen more deeply to the land, to the stories that endure, and to the lives still calling us home.