Dissolve - by Sherwin Bitsui (Paperback)

About the Book

Drawing upon Navajo traditions and language, Sherwin Bitsui composes a brutal and catastrophic passage through the American Southwest.

Book Synopsis

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." --Library Journal

Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century's most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.

From "(Untitled)"

. . . Jeweled with houseflies,
leather rattles, foil-wrapped,
ferment in beaked masks
on the shores of evaporating lakes.
This plot, now a hotel garden,
its fountain gushing forth--
the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award. He currently lives in Arizona where he has serves on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Review Quotes

"The formal integrity of Bitsui's lines enables seamless transitions from the momentary to the timeless, from each disorienting and dazzling idea to the next... Bitsui's exhilarating poetics lay in the blur of time, the slow and sure slide from ghostlike ideas into haunted-looking things, in constant erasure and redrawing: 'No language but its rind / crackling in the past tense.'"--Publishers Weekly

"Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, 'a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon, ' that you will not find anywhere else."--Sherman Alexie

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry."--Library Journal

"[Bitsui's] images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are. In struggling to reconcile these opposing forces, his poems and prose poems enact a personal ceremony."--Arthur Sze

"When one runs across a young poet of incredible ability, it is hard not to pay attention. Sherwin Bitsui is such a poet, and his second book (Flood Song) presents a startling approach to Navajo experience... These untitled sequences of lyrics are disturbing in their familiar beauty and draw the reader into internal states that only a poet of an ancient land could translate into universal understanding."--Bloomsbury Review

"The formal integrity of Bitsui's lines enables seamless transitions from the momentary to the timeless, from each disorienting and dazzling idea to the next... Bitsui's exhilarating poetics lay in the blur of time, the slow and sure slide from ghostlike ideas into haunted-looking things, in constant erasure and redrawing: 'No language but its rind / crackling in the past tense.'"-Publishers Weekly

"Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, 'a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon, ' that you will not find anywhere else."-Sherman Alexie

"Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry."-Library Journal

"[Bitsui's] images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are. In struggling to reconcile these opposing forces, his poems and prose poems enact a personal ceremony."-Arthur Sze

"When one runs across a young poet of incredible ability, it is hard not to pay attention. Sherwin Bitsui is such a poet, and his second book (Flood Song) presents a startling approach to Navajo experience... These untitled sequences of lyrics are disturbing in their familiar beauty and draw the reader into internal states that only a poet of an ancient land could translate into universal understanding."-Bloomsbury Review

About the Author

Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award in 2010. He currently lives in Arizona where he has served as the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts since 2013.