"Saxellus: A Review of Denise Low's 'Wing' "

Saxellus: A Review of Denise Low’s WING

J. Khan Wing by Denise Low, Red Mountain Press, 2021.

Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low writes as a fifthgeneration Kansan of British, German, Lenape and Cherokee heritage. Her award-winning poetry, prose, and research have focused on the intersectionality of Native and settler heritage.

Recently Low left Kansas to be close to family in California: fortunately, her collected papers, spanning over 25 books and several decades, remain in the Kenneth Spencer Archival Collection of Kansas University.

Her latest book, Wing, draws from midwestern roots as well as her newfound purchase on the West Coast, where her Sonoma County home clings to the edge of a dry ravine. Her poems speak firsthand of the region’s tremors and anxieties: fiery trauma and cindered landscape. The Day the Sky Turned Orange recounts the ominous prelude to evacuation: A Godzilla-blast sunrise adds fuel to the horizon’s full throttle flames.

Underfoot, buried fault lines quiver

A related poem describes the tinderbox valley where she lives—only one road out of town, and firefighting helicopters thudding overhead: Arid gullies spider the slopes.

Dried juniper leaves swirl, ready to fire flammable pines.

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Wing extends Low’s career-length exploration of the spiritual relationship between Native inhabitants, the land, and mainstream culture. This theme underpins but does not restrict the scope of Low’s writing, which interrogates broader aspects of Western life, culture, family, art, and loss. Her family history and lived experiences as an American of mixed Native and European heritage illuminates an adaptive culture that has been maligned by Hollywood and Western portrayal. Low references, but does not dwell on genocide, broken treaties, forced marches, ecological mismanagement, greed, and outright theft. Rather, she shows that Native culture commingles, endures, and thrives in surprising ways that are invisible to the uninitiated.

Drawing on her mixed origins, Low navigates a cultural landscape fissured by divisive racial boundaries. Her prior book, Jackalope, brilliantly illustrated the subversive paradigm of ancient traditions and symbols grafted upon modern day truck stops, casinos, and postcards. In Wing, she writes of the opposite as well: A scattered herd dots the plains, detached heads, old bulls sent to the taxidermist and mounted.

White people display them on diner walls or hunting lodge trophy rooms with spot-lit niches.

With tongues cut out, a delicacy, they cannot speak.

They can only listen to stories told by drunks

Low expertly guides the reader through locale, history, and geographic terrain. In her workshops, Low teaches that indigenous storytelling traditions are rooted to specific natural landmarks. Mythology, tribal, and family history, she says, are mapped onto the land. This spiritual nexus between ancestral history and land casually permeates her written work. In Buffalo Jump she writes:

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B O OK R E V I E W

At the buffalo jump past Topeka we are almost home.

The cedar-lined hill is a kill site where giants died.

Below lie scattered bones, crosshatched by flint knives.

From childhood memory, Low observes the matriarchal enmity between indigenous and settler. My Heritage opens: “In the kitchen my Native mother boils / water for the mother-inlaw she hates.” As a child she is enamored by the sugary pomp of demitasse teacups and willow-ware patterns, but in the pivotal moment it is the combination of her native mother’s passion and her white grandmother’s reading of the leaves that captures Low, sets her lifelong spiritual compass.

She closes her eyes like a god of fate, swirls the leaves.

They form dollar signs, skeleton keys, bears, eels—black tea omens.

Low’s best writing reflects an informed and enduring voice that bridges cultures and reaches across generations. Her deeply spiritual poems parse so much more than meets the eye as she skillfully leads the reader to the liminal threshold of another universe: Let’s lean closer. Stars turn into glyphs where your eyes should be.

Look through them to the other side of the veil.

Remember what you see.

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Wing adds Western terrain to Low’s numerous books, publications, correspondence, and papers. Her decades’ worth of writings form an enduring portal. Wing examines the multicultural palimpsest and raises Native culture to the literary surface. Her compelling voice embodies the lived life, craft, and lyric of a Native culture that adapts to survive.