Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee’s “Words Like Thunder”
From staff reports
Award-winning Ojibwe author and Maple City resident Lois Beardslee has published a new book this month with Wayne State University Press. The collection of poetry is titled Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers. Much of the book centers around Native people of the Great Lakes but has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide.
A poem from Words like Thunder, titled “Fiction Versus Nonfiction” was featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine on April 9. Beardslee’s poem “is very appropriate for these times of disinformation and false narratives,” writes Naomi Shihab Nye, who selected the poems for the Times. One line is especially powerful, “So librarians dutifully tuck ‘history books’ into the realm of nonfiction, as they have been dutifully taught.”
According to Wayne State University Press, Beardslee tackles contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today’s indigenous peoples. She transforms the mundane into the sacred. Similar in style to Nikki Giovanni, Beardslee might lure in readers with the promise of traditional cultural material, even stereotypes, before quickly pivoting toward a direction of respect for the contemporaneity and adaptability of indigenous people’s tenacious hold on traditions.
Made up of four sections, the book is like a piece of artwork. Parts of the word-canvas are quiet so the reader can rest and other parts lead the reader quickly from one place to another, while always maintaining eye contact. More than anything, Beardslee emphasizes the notion that indigenous peoples are competent and wonderful, worthy of praise, and whose modernity is a function of their survival. She writes unapologetically with a strong ethnic identity as a woman of color who witnessed and experienced community loss of resources that defined her culture. Her stories transcend generations, time, and geographical boundaries—varying in voice between first person or that of her elders or children—resulting in a collective appeal.
Beardslee continues to break the mold and push the boundaries of contemporary Native American poetry and prose. This book will appeal to a general readership, to people who want to learn more about indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes, and to people who care about the environment and socioeconomic equality. Even young readers, especially students of color, will find parts of this book to which they can relate.
Contact one of our Leelanau County bookstores—the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, Bay Books in Suttons Bay, Dog Ears Books in Northport, or Leelanau Books in Leland—to pick up your copy of Beardslee’s Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers.
