Dissolve

by Sherwin Bitsui

“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.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, School

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2018

About the author

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan).

Reviews

[Jas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I totally understood this collection of poetry. There is nuance that I know went over my head. But I really loved reading it.

[Suzanne Ondrus · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is like abstract art- highly creative and some wonderful juxtapositions. However, I really did not understand the narrative. I wish there was a reader's guide or even just a paragraph at the end by the poet to educate readers. I appreciated moments where nouns became verbs- really amazing creation of verbs. My favorite lines: "the flattened field is chandeliered/by desert animal constellations"(14). Gorgeous!

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible ecopoetics from the Native perspective. Surreal enough to keep the abstract elevated, and incredibly visceral through its literalism. This book is dense and will knock the wind (as poisoned as we suffer through it) out of you.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is some dissolving work, that absorbs a great deal of thought. More like creative writing level 100. Make this another favorite for me of Bitsui’s work.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Powerful.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly didn’t find myself able to engage with these poems at all. It’s not to say others might not enjoy them. I’m sure they may, just not my type of poetry.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of lyric poetry/experimental poetry that does not offer narrative. When approached with this in mind this collection opens up to offer fascinating portraits of the shifting significations of culture, nature, and concepts. Each poem is like a snapshot offering challenging and inventive metaphors, images, and ideas.

This collection is composed of two poems. The first is a short poem describing a city. The second is an epic poem sectioned by page into components which intelligently offer commentary through the contrast in form, style, and subject matter. From the back of the book and Bitsui's Wikipedia page he explores "Navajo thought and language" in English. The juxtaposition of Navajo manners of speech, description, relations of concepts and objects, and life behaviors transposed against what an English speaker is familiar with is fascinating but does require a certain labor from the reader. Being a white guy unfamiliar in a nontrivial sense with the Navajo language I am unable to truly evaluate the effectiveness of this endeavor, but I can say that it provides wonderful thought experiments and transformations from my Western/European habituated thought.

Looking more into the author, he has won several prestigious awards and seems to be one of the premiere Native American poets. While I don't want to reduce this poet to a "Native American Poet" and I've tried evaluate him as a poet qua poetry, at the same time, I recognize the necessity of Native American literature as a category and as function of individual/communal expression that has been for too long erased. Although not in a position to survey the contemporary and historical state of Native American poetry where I can compare and contrast Bitsui, I also don't want to be a part of the violence of erasure of identity. Especially, as identity is abstractly at issue in this collection through the juxtaposition I mentioned earlier.

This engagement with Navajo and The Navajo is amazing for the surface I was able to scratch of it, but I can't help but be continuously confronted with the fact that there is so much depth that is inaccessible to me. This is the only reason for the four stars instead of five. But I do highly recommend this work and gleaned a great deal from it.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

With imagery almost too sumptuous for the subject matter, these poems resonate with working-class suffering, the isolation of the reservation, and the tragic loss of habitat. Lacking a center or a direction, this book is probably most satisfying if taken in small doses, such as one poem a day. Reading each poem repeatedly is rewarding, because it has a preciously fresh effect upon first reading, and subtler evocations during later ones. (I myself read the book a little faster.)

Some metaphors are quite evocative ("We are husbands to razed hillsides, wives to drowned bridges") and some themes prove comprehensible, such as the taking of open ground for a hotel. But much of the word-play is inscrutable, I feel that Bitsui stretches his talents a bit too much at times. I could have loved the phrase "dangling atop the periphery of an ax blade" but he overloading it by writing "dangling atop the periphery of an ax blade's slumber." After many pages of such jarring images, questionable metaphors, and recycled concepts (mouths, ladders, and elevators carry a heavy burden), I can't resist wondering sometimes if I'm being hoodwinked. One hopes eventually for more of a point, more of a resolution.

A few poems in the middle of the book seem well-integrated and describe people or relationships, but the only poem with a real story is the opening two-pager, The Caravan. I look forward to reading more poems like that one from Bitsui.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

On limbs of slanted light
painted with my mind’s skin color,
I step upon black braids,
oil-drenched, worming
from last month’s orphaned mouth.

Winged with burning — 
I ferry them
from my filmed eyes, wheezing.

Scalp blood in my footprints — 
my buckskin pouch filling
with photographed sand.

No language but its rind
crackling in the past tense.


•


Tearing apart cloud names — 
pierced fog commands:
douse the inferno’s ribs
with opaque forgetting;
clip dawn from the book’s dusk,
unfasten the song’s empty auditorium
over a garden of mute foals.

Tearing apart fog names — 
pierced cloud sings:
let them shriek from their hinges,
let them slice their gills open
with flint knives
and circle their ghosts
as frog-skinned antelope,
let them drag their legs over a trail
anchored to a ladder
that has soaked up blood
since land began crawling out of anthills.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first collection of Bitsui I have read and I was impressed. His poems are super rich in imagery based on punctuation and body parts, which I really loved.

His poems aren’t ones that you can read quickly. They take a while to digest and think about, but they are very rewarding and powerful to read.

That being said, I know that this collection isn’t for everyone. I would recommend it to anyone who loves to analyze and take a deeper look into poetry.

He explores themes of addiction, the earth, and the past and future.

[Adz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really amazing plays with language. Really appreciate the deanthropocentric project of the book as well as the expression of an indigenous experience that isn't confined to the explicitly political and shares numerous observations, life-ways and bits of interior experience. Some of lines are just heart breakingly beautiful by themselves.

I'm not sure I would have gotten as much out of it if I hadn't discussed it in class and if sherwin hadn't visited the school. It's very different from what I thought poetry was but I've found Sherwin's work to be mostly quite liberating.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poems read like “blurry visions at closing time,” traceries of “fossilized wind,” pottery shards of an archeological dig, and cryptic messages scratched in the shifting scree of a bleak, irradiated landscape of waste and want “chandeliered / by desert animal constellations.” Gorgeous cover art of sculpted sandstone of the North American Southwest.

“Forearms sliced with ladders—
the climb downward
climbs up to greet them.”
—from “Dissolution,” p. 57


Favorite Poems:
“I replace what I saw”
“Bison-bone sled”
“Benches face before.”
“Cranes pass as swans”
“Father’s dying ceased”
“Mother threw a platter”
“Her apparition ferries”
“The vowels of the starved”
“Moans sip light from dilated pupils—“

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bitsui reminds me to let words move into the shapes of feelings, rather than to try to use them to mean directly a thing. When I can let myself move through Dissolve without needing every phrase to make “sense,” something happens to me. I somehow know the insides of the words without the words having said that directly.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this on hour 4 of a 6 hour flight. Most likely didn't give it enough attention or time of day, but it was a bit obscure to me. I didn't know how to engage with the poems, and aside from recognizing some strong individual lyrical moments the poem as a whole was difficult to access for me.

[Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sherwin Bitsui is one of most reliably gorgeous and challenging writers of our time. This book is yet another demonstration of that. I hold my breath on each page, grateful for the idea that circulates within it before letting it go. And maybe I’m a little changed at the end.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Struggled with most of these poems - unclear what he was trying to convey. Reading them out loud just added to the confusion. This selection needs an apocrypha.

[Alyse Bensel · Rating 5 out of 5]

These devastating poems tap into the pain of substance abuse and familial loss. Bitsui's condensed yet still effervescent lyric style continues in this new collection.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a Best of the Best for the month of January, 2019, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet. http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1...

[Liaken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting imagery, but too insular to really sink in.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Jacob Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I bought a bit on a whim and I really enjoyed the excellent imagery and fluidity of the collection.

[Abby]

Mountains mountaining.

[Rachel Atakpa]

Stunning verbs, a living text

[Elizabeth StClair · Rating 4 out of 5]

it has a quiet rhythm to it. once you find it, it gets better.

[Lily Margeson · Rating 4 out of 5]

the language isn't difficult, but hoo boy is it difficult to figure out what the poems mean

[Sunnee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong imagery in differentiating rural vs city living in the desert through its people, customs, natural phenomenon, and materials.

[Rowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's like the written equivalent of an AI photo where nothing's real.

Thoroughly, impressively, and masterfully disorienting.

[Noah Doser · Rating 4 out of 5]

words words words... and more words. makes good poem.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Will they charge a fee
to resharpen the horns
of our dull speech?"

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure about this. I enjoyed it, it felt like a fever dream, but even though I ate this book up, I couldn't exactly feel for it.