Erika Bailey-Johnson’s I Hear Many Things: I Sense Them (Ninisidawenimaag, #2), written in both Ojibwe and English, begins with an epigraph from Cree knowledge keeper Ed Sackaney: "The first sign of love is to listen." Here we find a soundscape of forest creatures and trees, and a narrator who listens, asks questions, and imagines creative answers. The colorful drawings are done by children, and their often wild colors reflect a vibrant excitement about the natural world. A list of Ojibwe vocabulary in the back of the book, a very helpful Ojibwe pronunciation guide, and a clever rhyming technique (every English line rhymes with its corresponding Ojibwe line) lets these two living American languages ring out and speak to one another in the same space, which I found both moving and thrilling, especially when I read it out loud. Riverfeet Press (“Outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world”), 2021.
In Jessica Tornese’s YA time-travel series Linked (Book I: Linked Through Time; Book II: Lost Through Time, and Book III: Destroyed Through Time), I was impressed by her well-realized fictional world, which focuses on mostly one place, northern Minnesota, seen at several different historical moments over a span of about a hundred years. It seems to me that Tornese both researched well and imagined well; there’s equal weight and close attention paid to a modern teenage girl despairing over the dwindling bars on her cell phone and grimacing at a herd of fly-ridden cows as there is to the creeping awareness of the spread of a devastating fire in a frontier town in 1910. Tornese is especially good at getting into the bodies of her point-of-view characters; she makes me remember what it’s like to experience the thrills and agonies of life as a 15-year-old girl. It’s an exciting story, too. When a character gets trapped in another time and is desperate to get out, Tornese makes me feel her pain and confusion and I can’t bear to stop reading until I find out if she gets away. Solstice Publishing, 2012.
Even though many of Crystal Spring Gibbins's apt and lovely descriptions of nature occur in full daylight ("wild asparagus waves its ferny head," "[The mayflies'] sway-back bodies/ flex and glisten in the sun"), reading her book of poems Now/Here felt most to me like being in the woods in the dark. I love the dark and I love the woods, and the way you usually hear or sense something before you see it, right when it's right upon you. I get the feeling that Gibbins sees the natural world this way. Even when she knows what's coming, because she's seen it a million times in different years, in different seasons, that thing's beauty--and sometimes its danger--is a source of constant wonder and surprise to her. It's a joy to be in this book, which also lives fully in the world of other books; many of the poems make references to other poems and poets. I like this feeling of searching, borrowing, trying to find both the thing and the right way to say the thing. Holy Cow Press, 2017 (with a cover designed by another artist out of Lake of the Woods, Clay Gibbins).
