This book troubles our consideration of the language we use to carry our personal and national narratives ... Long Soldier is aware of the American tradition of reading a racial or ethnic identity, especially an indigenous language, as an art form. She has built a poetics that refuses those boundaries, even when she engages with her Lakota identity. Her literary lineage is wide and demanding ... Rather than subverting any particular structure, Long Soldier is leaping into new 'not yet defined' spaces. Whereas challenges the making and maintenance of an empire by transforming the page to withstand the tension of an occupied body, country and, specifically, an occupied language ... Though the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans is void of any gestures signaling sincere repair, Whereas ensures that this grief, this absence, will be given presence, be given a body to wonder.
Writers who live between two languages face an extra challenge in their role as lexicographers of metaphor. They must create a mythology through language that acts like double-pane glass. As in, they must correct for the distortion of the words they are translating from one language to another...Layli Long Soldier manages this double-ness with the precision of a master glassblower ... You do not slip into this book on silken bolts of easy beauty, but scratch yourself raw on language disassembled into glittering shards ... Two of Long Soldier's great strengths are the use of repetition like a hammer on concepts she believes need breaking, and lyricism when she believes a reader needs to feel wonder.
...one of the most innovative collections of poetry I’ve come across in a long time ... Long Soldier’s concern with whereas is akin to Solmaz Sharif’s in her powerful poem, 'Look.' Both poets interrogate beau acratic terminology, ultimately performing a poetic intervention on the vague, subject-free obfuscations that have come to characterize official governmental language. What is especially compelling about Long Soldier is that she not only undermines language, she undermines form as well ... Some readers may find elements of these poems too experimental or too difficult or perhaps even too political. And, to be sure, some pieces are more fully realized than others, but I’m okay with that, and I’m betting Long Soldier is as well. Whereas is an ambitious, ground breaking book. The world needs more of those.
The nature and effect of language is, in multiple senses, at the heart of the project of Whereas, but so, too, is the space in which poetic language is contained or held. Long Soldier is one of the most sensitive and adroit contemporary shapers of the printed map of poetry on the page ... In attending to the sonic and visual stirring of grass, Long Soldier’s poetry ingathers the senses of 'tók?a?’a?,' a Lakota word meaning—among other things not knowable by the 'casual American'—'to lose, to suffer loss, to be gone, lost.'
Whereas is Layli Long Soldier’s first book of poetry, and what an exquisite book it is ... '38,' which closes the book’s first section, highlights how Long Soldier writes poetry that treats history and poetry as living, unstructured, and unending things. Rules and requirements for poetry and for historiography do not apply here. The result is both a poem and a volume of poetry that pushes readers to reconsider how we understand written words and expression ... As a volume of poetry, Whereas offers something, especially in our current climate, that is alternately hopeful and depressing, depending on how radical your vision is. Though Long Soldier’s work should not be considered an easy stand-in for the processes of decolonization or undoing the U.S. government’s colonial violence, she pushes us, through formal experimentation and her refusal to be silent in the face of history and oppression, to consider that, at the very least, work like hers can play a role.
