Colorado writer Tanaya Winder’s first book of poems, “Words Like Love,” explores not just romantic love, but all kinds of love -- environmental love, social love and more.
As a member of the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations, she often writes of difficult and challenging issues, especially those of native people.
“Love's revolutionary capacity as an action and as a practice inspired me to create a book that might help a world that is full of struggling, hurt, lonely, longing, courageous, brave, and beautiful people that also believe in love's power,” she says.
Read three of Winder's poems:
dear moon hollow out my memory to a tree trunk in my mother’s womb i. i came into this world in my mother’s womb. my grandmother says it’s the moon or is it a pact from the past when the doctors say hereditary, to her like birds. my mother and i do not know to protect us, to save us. ii. long ago, there was a man
his leaving made when angels speak of love i’m pretty sure they didn’t mean drunken hockey fans spraying fifty-seven native children with beer, taunting with racial slurs like “Go back to the reservation” If love is all coming and going this is coloniality starting back the meaning of words like, love and hate. And you gotta hate that the voice that said them still echoes in your head, still Love is action and we cannot tell where an echo ends and giving birth; because of this she is sacred. Yet, murdered in Canada alone and the numbers in the US are still statistics: Nearly half of all Native American women have been raped, stalked, or beaten. When angels speak of love I’m certain they didn’t mean this. Our women and children are being & are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault crimes and survive end? When you’re missing in life and missing in when angels try to speak of love my ears strain to hear if ever mention us and I wonder |
