Description
Eric Gansworth, Onondaga, was raised on the Tuscarora Reservation. This work echoes the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, where the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically, historically, and culturally by expressing the tensions experienced by marginalized Peoples struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. With equal measures of humour, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth’s poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry, creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth’s remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York’s Indian communities.