“In combinations of ekphrasis, meditation, and imaginative play, White opens his poetic field to the typographical sign. As a Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí, he initiates a poetic trajectory in this, his second remarkable book, that cuts across the roots of what we call American culture when, for instance, he asks ‘how does a letter become another when its origin is lost?’ LETTERRS is his complex ars poetica, a book of love poems to the grapheme and ‘its outbreak of silence.’ But it is also a provocative and systemic reorientation of language toward ritual, toward ‘bone-shaped artifacts,’ and the ‘notochord of thought.’ In LETTERRS, Orlando White situates the word at the unsettled beginning of human dialogue with the world.”—Forrest Gander

ORLANDO WHITE is the author of Bone Light (2009). He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. He is a recipient of a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency, and a Bread Loaf John Ciardi Fellowship. He has taught at The Art Center Design College and Brown University. Currently, he teaches at Diné College and in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.