Oklahoma Summer - by Margaret Lee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Summer in Oklahoma always brings heat, storm, and explosions of life on the tallgrass prairie, one of the most severely threatened ecosystems on earth. In recent summers, human drama has eclipsed its natural wonders. A global pandemic caught the state in a death grip, along with new moments of reckoning with Oklahoma's painful demographic history, including the removal of Native People to Indian Territory after the Civil War and the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Oklahoma Summer registers its summer heat, celebrates Oklahoma's beauty, laments its people's pain, and reaches for new possibilities.

Review Quotes

"Oklahoma Summer begins in the bounty and abundance of a prairie riotous with flowers and ends with an acorn falling to earth. In the space between the first and last poem, it studies the tangled history of a contested territory. Nature poems give way to an Atlas Obscura-type inventory of the curious human spaces of Tulsa. These poems, in turn, lead us into a documentary project that catalogues a history of stolen land, broken treatises, and racial violence. In these poems, Margaret Lee speaks in a prophetic voice similar to that of Isaiah. Her vineyard song gives way to an indictment of how this nation of European colonizers has joined house to house and field to field to wrest land and goods from rightful owners. But Lee is too good a poet, too good a student of history to write political poems that do not also engage in self-scrutiny. In these poems, she shows us how to write a poetry of place attuned to both the present and the past."

-Jeremy Paden, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature,

Transylvania University, author of Word as Sacred Burning Heart

"Oklahoma Summer marks the interstices within a dynamic social ecology. Singing in quiet spaces, meditating in unquiet times, Lee's words cultivate a deeper understanding of a moment in which presence is an engagement with absences and the present is a reckoning with the past."

-Steven Woods, Associate Professor of Humanities & Native American Studies,

Tulsa Community College

"Margaret Lee's Oklahoma Summer blooms with butterfly weed, primrose, bird calls, and the currents of tallgrass prairie. It is a complicated pastoral in remembrance for what must not be forgotten-the wounds of drought, excavation of mass graves from the Tulsa Race Massacre, and displacement of the Muskogee. Her poems beautifully toil beyond boom and bust to plant what ignites imagination and memory."

-Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times