Billy Last Crow, Poems by J.P. Dancing Bear
Billy
Last Crow is a memorable sequence of poems about the struggles
of its protagonist, a Native American, to make a life in a country in
which he is as much foreign as native. Writing in clear, unadorned lines,
J.P. Dancing Bear has created an entire life within these poems.
Sample Poems by J.P. Dancing Bear
Interview
with J.P. Dancing Bear
J.P. Dancing Bear's website
"Billy Last Crow
is moving, eminently clear, deeply felt and raw. The horror of what
Billy experiences is intermixed with a certain beauty which seems to rise,
oddly and unexpectedly, from what is, so it seems to me, a tragic, uniquely
American story. Noted Native American poet Bear conveys Billy Last Crow's
alien and desperate experience as he struggles to overcome bigotry and
labeling at the same time he must contend with the erosion of cultural
identity and parental and other forms of loss."—Robert Sward, author
of Heavenly Sex and Rosicrucian in the Basement: Selected Poems
“Billy Last Crow speaks to us about the darkness of life
on a reservation and the search for identity and tradition while struggling
to survive and break through the day-to-day patterns of alcohol, violence,
and poverty—the isolation in this wholly American-made landscape,
which the white man had introduced into this spiritual terrain.
It is a powerful work full of story and heart and spirit. I was
instantly pulled into its weave.”—Priscilla Lee, author of
Wishbone
“There is no facade in J.P. Dancing Bear's poetry. It's real. He
brings open wounds, healed scars, hard-learned lessons, desperate despair,
and unfaltering passion of the human condition into haunting portraits
of modern life.The poems in Billy Last Crow retain accessibility
while communicating in multi-levels. The warmth and vividness of the writing
invites us to peer in the already open door and have a look around. We
take the invitation and walk right in.Bear is a natural. He does what
all good poets do—he makes us curious.”—Dan Sicoli,
poet and editor of Slipstream
“Bear starts his series of poems with a boy 'Leaving Early'...It’s
what we don’t yet know about the drama that intrigues us.
We learn how the boy feels about, copes with, and eventually comes to
terms with the hostility he encounters on and off the reservation.
In the book’s most moving and tightly crafted poem, ('Comparing
Bottles') Billy leaves 'the reservation / to breathe outside the cage,
/ outside the bottle of his father, / not to wear a white flag' only to
find that 'the white walls of the office he worked in / were just labels
on a different bottle, / the booze of money a little smoother / to swallow...'
These poems go down easy, but the taste remains."—Robert Funge,
author of The Passage
J. P. Dancing Bear lives in Northern California. His poems have appeared
in hundreds of publications including Atlanta Review, Verse Daily, The National Poetry
Review, Poetry International, Seattle Review, Permafrost, The Baltimore
Review, Adirondack Review, Controlled Burn, Clackamas Literary Review,
Rattle, New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Pearl, the Montserrat Review;
Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and the Rio Grande Review.
He is a founding editor of Disquieting Muses and was the Editor-in-Chief
of Disquieting Muses/DMQ Review
for five years. He is now the editor of The American Poetry Journal. Dancing Bear is
the author of several chapbooks including What Language, won the 2002 Slipstream Press
Poetry Prize. Dancing Bear's poems have been nominated four times for
Pushcart Prizes. He is the host of "Out of Our Minds" a weekly radio show
for public radio station KKUP featuring some of today's best contemporary
poets.
ISBN 1932339213 , 92 pages, $16.00
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