You and I, and Spilyáy

“With a journalist’s eye for detail and a mystic’s celebration of the surreal, Briggs explores faith and doubt, life and death, and what it means to witness to what happens in between these states of being and awareness.”

— Sarah K. Carey 

“Here is Briggs’ language that brims with terrors and wonders of the heart/lands of the Pacific Rim…Here is poetry that contains Indigenous women’s wisdom and Whitman-esque multitudes to sustain anyone “longing for connection, for the world to hear their pleas.”

— Sandra Yannone, author of Fire at the Big Top

This collection is an antidote for the times we are living in – and a reminder through incision and lyricism that love is our only real choice, and our hope still rests in the words of Martin Luther King that the long moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.

— Dr. Elizabeth Parent, Yu’pik/Dineh, professor emerita San Francisco State

Grounded in living memory, Briggs brings tenderness and moral urgency to poems shaped by inheritance and renewal. Moving from her early childhood amid the Civil Rights era in California’s Central Valley to the Murdered and Missing Peoples to the wonder of the Pacific Rim, the poems compare the figure Spilyáy with modern day forces the endanger Pacific salmon, clean water and sacred places, asking what it means to remember rightly, to grieve and to remain answerable to the future.

— Saint Julian Press

With calm elegance, precise language, and the spirit of the Pacific Northwest, Kara Briggs sings her people onto the page. River in my Veins is both protest and celebration, a reminder to readers that the Sauk-Suiattle, Wenatchee, Chelan, Entiat, and Skagit peoples are still harvesting, fishing, and remembering. Land we live on land, she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth.

– Deborah Taffa, Whiskey Tender

“Rivers in My Veins” is a work of lyric courage that celebrates the interconnectivity of the earth and her people while confronting, through unflinching investigative addresses, the false settler-colonial narratives and power structures within these narrative’s problematic etymologies and extractive practices. Kara Briggs’ tenacious spirit and fierce love of the lands, waters, and stories of her Coast Salish people makes “Rivers in my Veins” a powerful debut collection that will become a vital contribution to our shared world’s literary—and deeply alive—landscapes.

– Jennifer Elise Foerster, editor of  When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

With a journalist’s eye for unflinching truth, Kara Briggs’s Rivers in My Veins assembles precise language, lyric verse and innovative form to produce a finely wrought blend of Native perspective poetry. Briggs compels the reader to hold onto familiar narratives of landscape and family while learning more layers of story. At the heart of this collection, a drum of knowledge beats, aiming at nothing less than uplifting the experience of American Indians who are every bit as intellectual and human as the readers of this book. I have known Kara Briggs for many years waiting for this collection to come to light. Now we will be better as a nation for reading Rivers in My Veins.

– Suzan Shown Harjo, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, editor of  Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations 

In groundbreaking forms and language that speak directly to her ancestors, elders, and future generations, Kara Briggs amplifies the legacy of her Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama peoples and of Native American poets writing before her to place her family and tribal histories outside of the parenthesis forever. Reading River in My Veins remains a journey in poetry that I will carry in my veins forever. I am grateful; I am humbled, but most importantly, I am eager for the conversations that Briggs’ debut river of poetry will provoke in American letters.

– Sandra Yannone. author of The Glass House and Boats for Women

The poems in Kara Briggs’s debut, Rivers in My Veins, awe with their gorgeous imagery and their unparalleled wisdom. They will make you cry, cause you to seethe with anger, and comfort you with their testimony of resilience. Deeply embedded in the culture of the Coast Salish and Interior Salish peoples, Rivers in My Veins is spiritual, ascendant, and damning. In some poems, Briggs pierces the reader by bringing home the personal toll caused by devastating colonial acts like the flooding of Celilo Falls, while in others she insightfully meditates on the meanings of fraught terms like “sovereignty” and “apology.” The book moves from breathless love poems such as “Ancestor Moon,” where the speaker is “turned to mist,” to poignant explorations of the tragedy of in-fighting within the speaker’s Tribal community. The strikingly lyrical poems in Rivers in My Veins beguile with their beauty and at the same time teach you how to live.

– Ann Tweedy, author of The Body’s Alphabet and A Registry of Survival