The Book of Bearings puts the puzzle pieces of the New World together without a picture on the puzzle box. The characters struggle to situate themselves between what they were and what they are supposed to become. The poems include voices from the mid-nineteenth-century Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the mid-twentieth-century Eskimo experience in Alaska, as well as personal narratives. This book addresses the Native American process of assimilation from first contact through education in the civilized world. It is a view of that world from the eyes of those who were seen as the conquered.
The Book of Bearings seeks its bearing in a shifting world. Often it focuses on the effects of Christianity. The characters use the new language to frame their various experiences. They use language as a tool for understanding what cannot fully be understood, which, for the believer, is the transformation in Christ when he left the world charged with his light.
عن المؤلف
Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. She has published six books with Wipf & Stock— Uprising of Goats (2014), One of Us (2015), Ironic Witness (2015), Mary Queen of Bees (2017), and The Servitude of Love (2017).Check out my interview with Sheila Tousey