Tanaya Winder's Words Like Love sings the joys, glories, and laments of love. As an accomplished poet, Winder traverses the darkness in a quest to learn more about the most complex of subjects. With beauty and ease, she explores emotion and thought through the poems featured in this debut collection.
Tanaya Winder is a writer, educator, and motivational speaker from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She graduated from Stanford University and earned her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She is an editor at As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, and the director of the Upward Bound Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She blogs at Letters from a Young Poet (tanayawinder.com).
"These poems are echoes from the intimacies of love songs, truth telling, and survival. I can use them to make sense of my life as an Indigenous woman, and in that way Words Like Love is a cure for the god-shaped hole in my heart."--Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
"I am already changed by this collection: in its keen intelligence, its vast empathy, and in the courageous specificity of each and every remembered wounding. Gracias, hermana-hija-poeta."--Cherríe Moraga, author of A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010
"Beautifully crafted, woven with grace, Words Like Love takes its place among the voices of Chrystos, Janet Marie Rogers, and Joy Harjo. Mahsi cho, Tanaya Winder. Your voice is astonishing."--Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed
"These poems are a love song for a generation, for those who do everything they can to stand with dignity despite the insults, for those who have died tragically because they could not carry what these poems are carrying. . . . The poet is a beautiful straggler of history who through poetry has learned how to fly."--Joy Harjo, United States Poet Laureate and author of An American Sunrise: Poems
I. Lessons in Frailty
dear moon
reflections of the moon
the weight of water
in my mother's womb
lessons in frailty
handling paper dolls
a story about winter
one day you will encounter a house flooded
the stone mother
surrender to memory
softly: how to evaporate
after, life
the textures of silence
II. Language Less Learning
broken/pipelines
raw
Sonnet MCLXXXI
sculpt-her
the impermanence of human sculptures
entering the age of doubt
w(hole): self-medication
when we banish tongues
learning to say i love you
language less learning
crazy eight: keeping pace
what john wayne couldn't have known
ten little indians
sometimes i dream a reservation resides inside me
intertribal
III. Forbidden Acts
forbidden acts
the war on words
love in a time of blood quantum
when angels speak of love i'm pretty sure they didn't mean
patrick would never say the word love
everything you need to know about relationships can be found in a restroom stall
love on paper
psalm of surrender
somewhere being written
excavation
IV. The Order of Things
the order of things
please remember me
teaching the riff
if there is something to
some kind of dying
post-flight assessment: the call of urgency
awakening: you died while i was sleeping
never meant to touch
unchained melody
measure by measure: the body begs
consider the assemblage of a longing
the significance of a hanging
the milky way escapes my mouth
we were once two stars
winter--birds of flight
back to the beginning
Acknowledgments
Also Of Interest
