Claiming Breath (North American Indian Prose Award) [Hardcover]

Diane Glancy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1992 | Series: North American Indian Prose Award

Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls “a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters . . . and a final acceptance of the broken past. . . . It’s a year that covers more than a year.”

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This collection of works records the difficulties and moments of doubt, as well as the insights and joys of the author's life as a Native American woman who has raised two children, divorced, and is continuing the struggle to find her place in the world. Some of the pieces are short essays, others are traditional poems, while still others are prose poems. A number of the pieces are titled just with dates, giving them a journal-like quality. Some of these works focus on domestic concerns, but many are broad probes into larger issues that involve culture, ethnicity, and writing. In a poem called "Ethnic Arts: The Cultural Bridge," the author writes, "I want to share what it's like to think as a/Native American. This will be nonlinear." And, indeed, the wanderings in this collection provide an interesting and various look at contemporary American life.
- Jessica Grim, Oberlin Coll. Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Glancy (the story collection Trigger Dance, 1990) won the North American Indian Prose Award for this wildly uneven grab-bag in the form of a journal: fresh language and banality, fine prose- poetry and self-indulgence. For Glancy, cut off young from her Cherokee grandmother, a connection to Native American culture seems as much willed as transmitted: After her divorce, ``I picked up my Indian heritage & began a journey toward [it].'' She explains that ``I was born between 2 heritages & I want to explore that empty space, that place-between-2-places'' through ``the breakdown of boundaries between the genres...the non-linear, non-boundaried non-fenced open-prairied words.'' In pieces such as ``Ontology & the Trucker\or, The Poem Is the Road,'' Glancy succeeds: While in the boundary-world of long-distance driving, she takes ``truckers who like to be followed'' as her almost mystical guides--they become ancient herds of buffalo migrating across the prairie, broken pieces of her intuitive, part-Cherokee father, even the form and energy of her poem. But too much of the book is devoted to warmed- over feminism, a justification of Glancy's Christian beliefs, along with sometimes lame comparisons of Christianity and Native American religion, and advice to writers that's so basic one wonders whether parody was intended. A worthwhile model for those advocating women's journal writing as a road to self-actualization and for people seeking to reconnect with a lost cultural heritage; other readers will be only intermittently rewarded. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 119 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; First Edition edition (February 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803221401
• ISBN-13: 978-0803221406
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,386,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A collage composed of events of one year, September 24, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Claiming Breath (North American Indian Prose Award) (Paperback)

Diane Glancy composed a college of snippets, written over the course of a year in her life. She reflects on her marriage, her divorce, her mother's death - and most interesting, she confronts her own conflicts between her Cherokee heritage and her Christian training. Much of her material bubbled to the surface during the long hours on the road driving to schools to teach poetry. Glancy makes us feel we're accompanying her on her journeys, peeking over her shoulder - no, peeking into her mind as she explores memories and their relevance to the present.
Here's a telling line: "Aren't all of us made up of paradox and diversity, anger, hurt, hope, guilt, endurance?"
This is not an easy book. No real plot holds you to the structure. But it's an infinitely thought-provoking book, one to be savored in small doses and pondered upon in leisure.