Little Big Bully

Poet, artist, filmmaker, and curator Heid E. Erdrich won acclaim for exploring indigenous experience in multifaceted ways--personal, familial, biological, cultural. Her work "does nothing less than remake the world," according to Susan Power; her poems "ferry us back and forth between what fuels us and what makes us human," says Dorianne Laux. Written from the perspective of an Ojibwe woman, a Native American who is also white, these searing, long-lined poems, many of which are set in a small town on the prairie, reveal what sustained harassment does to people, especially to women, children, and Native and Indigenous people, how it can lead to the oppression of others, if not ourselves, and how such an environment of misogyny and sexual abuse can instill a psychological mechanism that makes a victim vulnerable to future abuse. The poems in Little Big Bully show us all abused in ways similar to the abuse Erdrich saw as a girl, then later as a woman stalked and harassed, and finally as a human struggling as our very humanity is assaulted daily.

In a new collection that is "a force of nature" (Amy Gerstler), renowned Native poet Heid E. Erdrich applies her rich inventive voice and fierce wit to the deforming effects of harassment and oppression.

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we - how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women's resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. What is truth now? Who are we now? How do we find answers through the smoke of human destructiveness? The past for Indigenous people, ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.