Trailing You

by Kimberly Blaeser

Poetry. "TRAILING YOU.a new collection of poetry to be read on a starry winter night in the old way when the lodge fire is high and wolves sing on the hill. Persuasive, language/image of memory rich in narrative; a lush, valuable sheaf of pure poems by what surely is destined to become an influential voice in American Literature: Kimberly Blaeser.who discovered sanity in the rhythmic sounds of words, the opulence of the heart, the circle of love and remembrance, and in her ancestors' values of tradition and song"-Maurice Kenny.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser, is currently at work on a collection of “Picto-Poems” which combines her photographs and poetry. She was selected to serve as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015-16.

Reviews

[cj · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Tori Welhouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trailing You by Kimberly M. Blaeser contains a Preface, which is not always common in a collection of poetry.

"I think the best poems might be nothing more than a list of names of people, animals, places, plants sounds, seasons, because poetry is connections and these are the connections -- the poetry -- we all carry in our soul, the poetry that writers try to bring to the surface."

Blaeser has an unusual heritage, of Anishinaabe and German ancestry, and there is a nascent quality to the poems, born of a wisp of memory and nebulous dream. Blaeser is immigrant and “Indian,” woman and tracker, lover and beloved. The poems assimilate her memories, stories and experiences. The poems also veer to the very opposite of assimilation – confusion, exclusion, misunderstanding. From "On the Way to the Chicago Pow-Wow":

On the way to the Chicago pow-wow,
Weaving through four lanes of traffic.
going into the heart of Carl Sandburg's hog-butcher to the world,
ironic, I think, landing at Navy Pier for a pow-wow.
I think of what Roberta said: "Indiana people across the country
are working on a puzzle, trying to figure out what I call
-- the abyss."
Driving into the abyss. Going to a pow-wow.

The collection is divided into five sections with a namesake poem in each section: Living History, Where I was That Day, Trailing You, Road Show and Sewing Memories. Taken together the poems are quilt-like, patches of color and feeling abutting each other, fretting, contributing to a design which covers a range of topics – identity, love, loss, family – all united by the thread of memory and a woman emboldened enough to recount it true.

From “Sewing Memories: This Poem I’ve Wanted to Write”:

Into all those things we made
we sewed bits of our bodies
and bits of our dreams
we sewed in errors more bold
than those required in sand paintings
And what we created seemed truly to be ours
because we did them that way
filled with make-believe and mistakes
instead of the usual way
and maybe this poem about sewing
refused to come out for such a long time
because I was trying to follow someone else’s perfect pattern
So I thought I’d just make it our way
lay the memories and stories out
zig-zag through time
and stitch them together the way I see them

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry in this book seems personal and conversational. The language is poetic, but is approachable. It seems like e kind of poetry to hand to someone who is wary of those things called poems.

I appreciated the many poems involving family and heritage. Quite a few dropped me back in time to my childhood. The first was about the many names people have given her. I remembered those I had in childhood too. It's good to be reminded.

I also appreciated her voice and all she brought to her poetry. She wrote a poem called 'American Indian Voices: I Wonder if This is an Indian Poem.' She shared about poetry experts and their ideas of what makes a poem Indian - is it the subject matter like fry bread, bingo, and powwow, or is it how they speak of these and other things? Indian poetry doesn't have to fit what the experts deem to be Indian poetry. It seems she believes it's an Indian poem if an Indian wrote it out their life experiences.