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In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home.
Psalm to Whom(e) centers on Kansas and rural Texas, places that usually see the underside of planes. Glancy focuses on geography. History. Origins. Memory. Faith. Once in a while, in desperation, she offers a prayer to whom(e)ver is there. Glancy stretches and pulls the language to see behind the words: old Native thought patterns, for instance, or echoes of Gertrude Stein. She takes us with her into museums, churches, and national parks, shuttling freely between personal, cultural, and spiritual history, narration and poetic exploration.
Psalm to Whom(e) defines the world as a place on which to mark, as evidenced in the earliest pictographs. Embedded in the markings on cave walls and rock facings are circles and spirals in which the impulses to move, to travel, to migrate, to explore one’s own inner wilderness and solitude are homed.
The “whom(e)” is in an essay, “Among My Friends Are Letters of the Alphabet.” “As a loner I write a lot because I have to have something to do and the letters of the alphabet always are there.” The isolation of Covid may have driven her farther back into history, she says. Into the beginning of faith on the prairie. Into her own believing on her grandfather’s farm and her own father’s work in the stockyards. “Sometimes I add letters to words. As an ‘e’ as in ‘whome’ because then I see home, for which I always am looking.”
Praise for Psalm to Whom(e)
“[A] page-turner, [Psalm to Whom(e)] moves with vision and
alacrity through its terrain of back roads, anomic landscapes, lost languages,
loneliness, and God-hunger in its search for the various voices and guises of
‘the Whome who is supposed to be over all.’” —Lisa Russ Spaar, Image
Journal
“This dazzling variety of poems, proems, and creative nonfiction takes the reader on both an outward and inward pilgrimage from home to home. Driving, always driving, through sparse and lush landscapes, the present moment and memory inextricably linked, Glancy saturates her journey with Native wisdom and biblical story. She sews a quilt, stitching together the stories and meditations into a vast network of connections. It is more than masterful. It is a thrilling, electric ride.”—Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Professor Emerita of English, Wheaton College
“Diane Glancy explores new
modes of converging poetry and storytelling in Psalm to Whom(e), a
powerful and moving “investigational [re] imagining” of the road diary
completed in the midst of personal isolation and a global pandemic. “Driving is
a time of communion,” the speaker submits, “[e]specially the roads that call
one to look at what one is inside. Often with devastating vision.”
Glancy’s record of solitary travel spans a multiplicity of indexical forms
quilted to unearth childhood memories, “feel the confines of the oppressive
past,” and to p/robe Indigenous
futurity. The dedicated reader of innovative poetry will be hard-pressed to
encounter another book this year that quivers and pulsates with the same
capaciousness and vitality of beginner’s mind. A bravura work by a truly great
poet.”—Paolo Javier,
author of True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside and
O.B.B. aka the Original Brown Boy
Praise for Diane Glancy
“Glancy is a treasure.” —American Book Review
"Stunning....A graphic and compelling mosaic..." —Library Journal, starred review
"A moving testament to the creative act of enduring." —Foreword Reviews, starred review
"What bounty to have Glancy's great art erupt once more." —Spencer Reece
Diane Glancy is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and professor emeritus at Macalester College. She has won the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and more. Publishers Weekly named her book Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears one of the ten essential Native American novels, and Booklist named A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story an Editors’ Choice. She lives in Gainesville, Texas.