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Sage Ravenwood. Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost. Gallaudet University Press (86 pages, $19.95, paperback: ISBN 978-1-95462222-7, ebook: ISBN 978-1-95462223-4).
Introduction
Sage Ravenwoods 2023 publication, Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost catapults a marginalized culture into an active literary spotlight. The collection, divided into six sections, serves as a compelling platform for Ravenwoods advocacy against domestic violence, animal abuse, and cultural conflicts. Bridging ability poetics, ecopoetics, and documentary poetics through a string of passionate protests, Ravenwoods energetic aesthetics accompanies the highpowered militancy of fellow Indigenous poets Ai, Joy Harjo, and Layli Soldier. This extraordinary collection of poems raises awareness for Indigenous Deaf views often overlooked in public and private spaces. The Deaf community has challenged audist and orálist views for years. Indigenous individuals are often marginalized. The innovative marriage of these two distinct groups through Deaf indigenous artistry intensifies the need to support Ravenwoods poetic wisdom. Select poems are highlighted throughout the sections below.
Section One: "Resonance"
"Resonance" captions unforeseen stages of clarity and fear in domestic relationships. The first poem, "Among the Missing," startles the soul with razor-sharp syntax. Love, an entity that should be attainable, is missing. The absence of this sensitive energy preludes internal struggles that include "lung balloons choking" the persona "out of home." This alarming synergy shifts to "I'm Not the Branch," a poem that divides regional languages of love into alternate rhetorical worlds. Ravenwood writes:
I hold up a hand as if to wave
Middle and ring fingers arrowed down rocking
horns with the thumb sticking out
What remains is supposed to be the ASL sign for love
My thumb index and pinky touch yours
Fingers air kissing in signage Hello, I love you
But you and I are different signs black birds circling
The sign for "love"-"my thumb index and pinky"-visually integrates and interrogates "fingers air kissing" and "black birds circling," candid images that...