Layli Long Soldier
Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Source
Obligations 2
As we
embrace resist
the future the present the past
we work we struggle we begin we fail
to understand to find to unbraid to accept to question
the grief the grief the grief the grief
we shift we wield we bury
into light as ash
across our faces
Published:
2014
Length:
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2022
2023
Themes:
Death & Loss
Faith & Hope
Poetic Form
Literary Devices:
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Enjambment
a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line
Epizeuxis
words or phrases repeated one after another in quick succession
Repetition
a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times
Visual Poetry
Poetry written on the page with intentional form to add meaning to the poem.