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Doubters and Dreamers (Volume 67)
Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against “What’s a debacle, Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.
In the first half of the book, “Tribal History,” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”—stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother’s “ferocious, upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle, I was still her child”), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”
In the second half of the book, “It Was Raining,” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman,’ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.
In the first half of the book, “Tribal History,” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”—stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother’s “ferocious, upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle, I was still her child”), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”
In the second half of the book, “It Was Raining,” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman,’ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 20, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 26, 2023
I loved how she used nature to relate back to her ancestral roots and how rain was a constant in her life. I’m happy that she was able to find herself and learn to love herself by the end of the book!
May 17, 2024
Pretty enough prose-segments, left abandoned, it seems, mid story? And poems that just… lacked ambiguity, suggestion of further interiority beyond that within the text itself. Overall I found this collection quite lifeless.
April 5, 2011
The poems in Doubters and Dreamers are spare, with a quiet power that creeps up slowly. Her poems focus on nature, lived experience, family and love. The book opens with a poem about the lynching of a native effigy, and the challenge continues from there: mother daughter relationships are explored for their difficulty, and questions of identity and sexuality appear again and again. Some of the love poems are very beautiful. The poems play with form: prose poems (which are really the best in the book – despite the sparseness, her writing tends toward the grammatically correct, complete sentence, giving the prose poems a real chance to shine), lyrics, sonnets (particularly crowns or sequences), and even a villanelle.
December 7, 2012
These poems spoke to me. They are stories of a young woman, Native American and lesbian, trying to find her way in the world, dealing with a strong-willed mother, a community that won't accept her, love affairs and the death of her father. They are also poignant descriptions of every day life. I happen to know Janice personally so I could her her voice in the poems. But I like to think that even if I didn't know her I would feel the same way.
March 29, 2015
I have read all three of Janice Gould's books of poetry. I love her poetry.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews