Book Review :: She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild
Review by Jami Macarty
By “digging deep / in [her] bone memory” with “unfailing hands,” Cree poet Rosanna Deerchild offers readers She Falls Again. In her third collection of poems, Deerchild devotes her attention to “cultural storytelling” and “sing[s] honour songs” while “carry[ing] / her broken notes” through “the voices / of [her] mother / her mother and hers.” The songs and stories are “history mementoes”:
“it is written on my mother’s residential school skin
it is whispered by my grandmother’s tb ghost
it is the lonely grave of my grandfather in your field of honour
it is the target on my back”
“[L]ooking madder than a broken treaty,” “the-woman-who-falls-from-the-sky was an indian woman.” But hers is not mental illness; it is the intense rage of a “normal person” in an impossible situation where one person accuses the other of a fault which the accuser bears: “they call us savage / while they ravage // the earth our mother.” To the dominant/mainstream culture, an “indian woman” is “disney porn” and “a body of land conquered.” The “burial mounds // sharp and waiting.”
The poet “gathers all her grief” around Indigenous women who are “not /missing / just not here,” and for whom there is no explanation for “why so many / of just-us go without justice.” On the violence toward Indigenous women, she will “be silent no more.”
Rosanna Deerchild is “the returning voice / from the silence // the telling / story” of the women of her matrilineal line. Their “stories are scars [she] turns to stars / set free in the sky of telling.”
In She Falls Again, women rise up,
“making their way back
to the front
making their way
to lead”
In her “strong woman song,” Rosanna Deerchild “writes [women] alive.
She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild. Coach House Books, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
