Dissolve

Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century’s most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

From “(Untitled)”:

. . . Jeweled with houseflies,
leather rattles, foil-wrapped,
ferment in beaked masks
on the shores of evaporating lakes.
This plot, now a hotel garden,
its fountain gushing forth—
the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award. He currently lives in Arizona where he has serves on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.