Distant Water - by Beth Piatote (Paperback)

About the Book

"A remarkable debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection between land, sound, and spirit"-- Provided by publisher.

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.

Review Quotes

"distant water moves through meadow, river, and mountain with the clarity of a song returning home. Beth Piatote writes with the Nez Perce language, its sounds, images, and breath, to create a vivid document of reclamation and futurity. The poems also live in relation to the language of land and its beings: birds, coyotes, fish, horses, butterflies. Each speaks as the world renewing itself. On the page, white space becomes landscape, a field where language moves beyond the line. distant water shows us how to listen for what still sings."--Jake Skeets, author of Horses and Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

"Beth Piatote re-roots me in awe for what language can do. These poems rise and breathe. It feels like medicine: 'You who feel small / remember this story / through strength of air / the world is remade.' For readers returning to their ancestral tongues or learning them for the first time, keep this book close. Study Beth Piatote's poems. distant water is elemental, committed, and full of memory."--No'u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled

"This collection does not merely describe worlds. It makes and unmakes them, slipping between tongues to stitch new relational geographies. In her hands, language is alive and ancestral, sensuous and sovereign. distant water is not only a book--it is a resurgence, a remembering, a radiant act of return."--Jennifer Reimer Recio, author of Keşke

About the Author

Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce scholar, playwright, poet, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include the scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature and The Beadworkers: Stories, which was long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her play, Antíkoni, had its world premiere with Native Voices in Los Angeles in November 2024. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including American Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, World Literature Today, and PMLA. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Piatote is devoted to the study of her heritage language of Nez Perce and is an Indigenous language revitalization activist, living in Berkley, California.