Being on the Moon

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

Annharte’s collection of poems is a fine contribution to the
contemporary renaissance of Native women’s writing, which is largely
making itself heard and known through small presses and academic
publishers. These poems are rich in traditional and contemporary Native
sensibility, in the felt experience of a clear-eyed female
poet-storyteller, who knows both bush and urban-street life and conveys
their convergence in an original and honest vision. Cyclical and
circular, the moon and its many faces is the binding metaphorical venue
for emotive poems of creative soundscapes and striking poetic narratives
of character and place. This collection is a celebratory tribute to
ancestral ways, and to the gritty, passionate endurance of Native women.
Annharte also re-creates the pain of victimization in racist white
culture, and its inscriptions and interpretations, as in:
“Frankensquaw / coming soon / to your neighborhood theatre.”

Above all, this collection demonstrates an amazing synergy between the
subjective oral voice of the Native teller, and witty, textual wordplay.
In “One Way to Keep Track of Who Is Talking,” for example,
“Language finds a tongue” is just such an ironic and self-reflexive
discourse, proving that Annharte is a mainstream poet writing from the
postmodern margins.