Hunger Moon

"Native American poet Susan Deer Cloud is the master of the long lament, and Hunger Moon is her mournful and magical masterpiece. The work is a song of celebration, but at times her pen becomes a low-sounding cedar flute, searching for that sorrowful note at the bottom of all the holes. When Deer Cloud lets loose one of her salty soliloquies about her mixed lineage mountain people and their exuberant and long-suffering lives, she clears the deck and points the finger at us all. But none of the colorful characters that inhabit Hunger Moon receive more poetic punishment than the poet herself. She wields a self-deprecating style of humor that goes beyond the call of humility. Deer Cloud digs deeper into the back-country Catskill mud she flings to find momentary marvels of wisdom and insight that are simply stunning ... sentences of solid gold. At those moments ... and there are many ... readers will feel they have discovered genius and perhaps touched immortality." -Evan Pritchard, Mi'kmac, professor of Native Studies & author of No Word For Time, Bird Medicine & Native New Yorkers. "Reading Deer Cloud's words sets in motion a journey for the creative mind that equally stirs the skin, breath, and vision. Her poems resuscitate both new and familiar passions; the deeply honest word-stories expose my own naked soul by poem's end. In "Bear Hunt," Deer Cloud writes, "Granddaughter, when I crawl through that membrane separating your life from what people misname my death, I can sometimes weep tears again ..." Throughout the book, words like these provide the alchemy that thrills and sparks soul-light and calls into today's life an amplified truth that inspires the spirit of my own ancestors to dance inside this warmed skin."   -Anecia Tretikoff O'Carroll, Alutiiq, has poems in Native anthology I Was Indian & is the author of Loud Blood Sings Me Home. "Susan Deer Cloud's "Hunger Moon" laments the starvation of the soul, the famine of the heart, the death of love. But like her grandmother's grandmothers, the Clan Mothers of the Longhouse, Susan points us to Spring's salvation, aborning in the hungry bellies of February. Wrap yourself in Deer Cloud's words. The truth teller awaits you under the "Hunger Moon."" -Paul Hapenny, Métis, author of award winning "Vig" made into film "The Money Kings" & of Kespukwitk: Land's End Poems. "In this, her finest collection of poems so far, Susan Deer Cloud inhabits not the manufactured misery of affluence pretending to grace, but the real pain of gunfire in the night, rape, a racist in Rolex dripping scorn over Latinos, Blacks, and Indians sitting one row over in a classroom, weeping from the attack. Her grace is earned, through mixed blood, discarded by carded Indians and family alike; through death by Dow visited for oil; through living on, as parents die prematurely of poverty and elite coeds dun her for using "I" and meaning herself. This volume is for the sturdy." -Dr. Barbara Alice Mann, Seneca, author of Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas & George Washington's War on Native America.