The 91抖阴 Berkeley Department of English celebrates the publication of distant water, the debut poetry collection by Professor Beth Piatote. A scholar, playwright, and author whose work has long engaged questions of Nez Perce language, history, kinship, and literary form, Piatote brings these concerns into lyric practice in a collection attentive to memory, place, and inheritance. Published following years of distinguished work across criticism, performance, and fiction, distant water opens new poetic relationships between memory and place that play out across inventive formal geographies.聽
On a blank sheet of paper I drew of rough map of the Columbia River and its major tributaries going out to the sea. Then I placed each poem along these waters, in the specific places from which the poems emerged or belong.
-Beth Piatote on the organization of the poems in聽distant water, from ""
As notes, "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."聽
The most fundamental work for me has been the language work I have been doing in my heritage language of Nez Perce over many years to understand its grammar, sounds, stories, and life force. The language is a living being among other living beings who are born of and thrive in our homelands, so this is a dynamic relationship.
-Beth Piatote, ""
We warmly congratulate Professor Piatote on the publication of this work!
