Spirit Matters: White Clay, Red Exits, Distant Others

"Spirit Matters is haunted by people whose voices are so indelible they speak from a world beyond this one--a powerful country where stories are spells that inhabit the living. Gordon Henry has created a compelling, uncanny book."--Louise Erdrich

A major new collection of dazzling, surrealistic, entirely original poems by an American Book Award-winning Ojibwe author, whose work appears in two new Joy Harjo-edited anthologies.

In parcels and particles, letters, images, repetitive themes, rhythms and sounds, Spirit Matters invites views into shadow spheres, of creative memory, reinvention of storied characters and place, as reminders of how poetry might turn longing, back to the very sound memory makes as we honor the imaginative lives of people and place. A collection of poetry, informed by irretrievable letters of loss, love, trauma, forged by musing on imagined relatives, living, dead, yet to be, shaped by spirit of places of we can never return to without understanding the living power of memory, story and song.