The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations. Oscillating between musical influences, including the repercussions of ethnomusicology, and the present/past/future, the collection rewrites and rerights what it means to be Indigenous, queer, and even formerly-emo in the twenty-first century.

"These poems come at you with a million volts of every kind of verbal and poetic intelligence, illuminating every kind of love. Every kind of longing, joy, and drive toward justice, too. Each poem lights up a new terrain where human experience becomes a landmark for everyone we ever touch—ancestor, mother, family, lover, other—everyone who makes us who we become." -Heid E. Erdrich / author of Little Big Bully