You might also like

More about Distant Water

• Book details
• Synopsis
• Trending among others

You get 33 loyalty points

Book synopsis

A remarkable debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection between land, sound, and spirit. As a scholar of Native American literature and law, Beth Piatote focuses on the endangerment of Indigenous languages. As an activist, she moves against the current of English-language colonization, working to rescue and revitalize the language of her people. Language, she posits, is an expression of land, a means through which we can travel great distances. distant water brings the reader into the language of our shared home, North America, revealing a sonic world and grammar governed by rivers, kinship, and ancestral knowledge. “In our homes and homelands,” she writes, “we share the language with the plants and animals and waters and rocks and sky.” Inventive and playful, these poems explore the sounds, structure, and wisdom of the Nez Perce language, illuminating its vitality and capacity to organize relationships to time and place. Braiding aural, linguistic, and spiritual ecologies, distant water conveys an understanding that to be in language is to be in place. To be at home.

Book details

• Full title: Distant Water
• Author: Beth Piatote
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96
• EAN: 9781639551682
• ISBN: 1639551689
• ID: 49131423
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Weight: 159 g
• Date of publishing: 10. March 2026

Trending among others

---

---

---