Debut collection examines Indigenous loss and recovery, both personal and cultural

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/>Beading Water, the first book of poetry by Mary Leauna Christensen, is an act of mourning and an act of making. To bead water, as the title suggests, is to string together one's tears, to gather loss drop by drop and shape it into art and meaning. Christensen, a mixed-race woman and enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, grieves her grandmother, her mother, and the maternal line that connects her to ancestral land and language. In these poems, mourning itself becomes a ceremony.

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/>The collection moves across multiple forms and languages, asking how an Indigenous person navigates loss in a landscape that has never been post-colonial. Christensen's identity as an amalgamation of Indigenous, Latinx, and European heritage deepens these questions, expanding the book's resonance to broader conversations about mixed heritage, belonging, and self-determination. Throughout, the speaker comes to understand that the bond to Indigeneity persists through death and colonial erasure, and that to name this persistence is itself an act of reclamation. In its emotional reach and formal ambition, Beading Water speaks to anyone who has had to grieve a person and a world.

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/>[Sample Poem]

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/>DAUGHTER PRAYER

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/>Within me/ a room is built for you/ great grandmother

/>great aunts/ a fire burns warm in the center/ save your

/>hands & knees/ those strong backs/ here/ floors always

/>glisten

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/>i remember/ so little/ Appalachian fog/ at the funeral

/>home you wore pantyhose & black/ i've poured coffee

/>into Styrofoam/ nothing is wasted/ this building once

/>schoolhouse/ a small basketball court/ still outside

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/>what is the difference/ between desks & pews

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/>daughters granddaughters nieces/ you remember

/>small/ press your lips/ to cool foreheads/ before

/>casket lids close/ you've only grown old/ buried girls

/>are burying yourselves now/ in same red dirt/ how

/>recognizable are namesakes/ grandmother mother me

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/>me gravedigger

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/>me home maker