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

An exquisite debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit.

Drawing its title from the Nez Perce word for ocean, distant water explores the mysterious process through which language is conveyed from one body to another, moving through waters, kin, memory, and breath. In this meditative, expansive collection, Beth Piatote reveals language as a shared vibration, a life force that sustains an intimate, animate world. Anchored in the Nez Perce homelands of the Northwest, the poems in distant water explore sonic and spiritual ecologies, recognizing land and language as living beings with whom we seek a common mode of expression.

Here, poetic forms mimic the verb-centered structure of Nez Perce language, showing its capacity to express from a single shared root the movement of a sewing needle, the flow of a river, or the memory of a lost love. Language resonates with the land in poems that recall the drumbeat pulse of blood, an echo of grief, the sigh of a dying fire, an archive held in the mouth of a crow. Characters and motifs from traditional stories are recast, celebrating their timeless beauty, humor, and wisdom, and remedies imagined for historical wounds borne by the language itself.

Inventive and resonant, precise and playful, distant water is an invitation to enter a vibrant thought world, to dwell in a grammar and sound born of and belonging to Nez Perce homelands and people, a language at once ancient and ever new.

Review Quotes

"What a gift that Piatote has shared this old, patient, still-powerful language capable of summoning the ocean's greatness to wash away our human griefs, to bear the burdens and errors of our human bodies and minds; language tender enough to praise the grass for bending to the wind, the meadow for holding us as we lie in rest upon it, praising even the river for lighting the fishes' scales with water; and still, a language that opens us enough to be touched by the hand in such a loving and miraculous way that a deer bounds out from the brush. How lucky to be touched, too, by these poems, which leave me feeling like I myself have bounded from my own tangles and thorns of brush out into a still beautiful, still loving world."--Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem

"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

"In distant water, remembrance transliterated becomes a pouring out of heart. A liquid surge rivers through these exquisite poems on loss and returns to language, love, and life. Every turn toward the depth of grief surfaces in brightness so that we read renewed. I am truly grateful for Piatote's promise of light and her sustaining voice."--Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully

"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.