Mother

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

A stunning, multimorphic work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity

mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.

Through poetic vignettes whose unconventional forms mirror the nonlinear, patchwork process of constructing a sense of self, m.s. RedCherries has crafted an indelible and utterly original work about the winding roads that lead us home.

m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.