DEMORTALIZING: A Poetic Memoir

by Elizabeth Hoover, Pamela Hall (Editor)

Demortalizing is not a healing journey.
It is a reckoning.
It asks for nothing and demands everything.

In this raw, unflinching collection of poetic warfare, the past is not romanticized - it is dismantled, brick by bitter brick. These verses trace the fault lines left by betrayal, grief, and manipulations, rendering them not as scars to conceal, but as architecture to expose. Each poem is a quiet It's sharp, riche, and deeply alive - as if a haunted castle learned to write and then published a manifesto.

From wolves to weeds, from broken armor to burning cities, Demortalizing turns the once-painful into the now-powerful. There are no gilded metaphors here - only sharpened ones. This is not about immortalizing what hurt. This is about naming it, burying it, and leaving a crown on the grave. It is a full-blown poetic part memoir, part funeral pyre, part glitter laced battle hymn.

For those who know the weight of silence and the heat of rising from ruins - this collection is yours.
For those of you who think this is about you... well... it probably is.

73 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Elizabeth Hoover is an academic that falsely claimed Mohawk/Mi'kmaq ancestry. She is currently associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley.  Her research focuses on Native American environmental health and food sovereignty movements. Her first book The River is In Us; Fighting Toxins in a Mohawk Community, (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is an ethnographic exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research. Her second book project From ‘Garden Warriors’ to ‘Good Seeds;’ Indigenizing the Local Food Movement (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) explores Native American farming and gardening projects around the country: the successes and challenges faced by these organizations, the ways in which participants define and envision concepts like food sovereignty, the importance of heritage seeds, the role of Native chefs in the food sovereignty movement, and convergences between the food sovereignty and anti-pipeline and anti-mining movements. She also co-edited, with Devon Mihesuah, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). She has published articles about food sovereignty, environmental reproductive justice in Native American communities, the cultural impact of fish advisories on Native communities, tribal citizen science, and health social movements.