Sherwin Bitsui (Navajo People, United States of America)
Por: Sherwin Bitsui
Bodies Wanting Wood
When the fire turns
I lotion my arms
The woman weaves a storm design
Smells rain in the canyon floor
The wind in winter sleeps between our fingers
During prayer
It is released and blows into town
A swarm of locusts with wings on fire
Sherwin Bitsui was born in the United Status in 1975. A native of the Navajo White Cone reservation, Arizona, he lives in Tucson, where he attends the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. He belongs to the Bitter Water People. He has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Red Ink, among others. Shapeshift is his first book. Shape: form, and shift: the systematic change in the phonetic or phonemic structure of a language (linguistic meaning), is the prelude to a very creative handling of the language: a dazzling geography inhabited by magical animals and dreamlike atmospheres with existential episodes that register beyond the linear draft of a realistic portrayal, the painful cultural clash ever present for the indigenous peoples. The poem, a musical piece made of words, is metamorphosed into something beyond itself and becomes the surreal border where language, without ceasing to be a creative tool, goes mad as it witnesses with an ironic tone a world always on the verge of disconnection.
