mother

Praise for mother:

“mother is at once a story, a memory, and a dream. ‘Riddled with shadowed humor that would bait the consciousness,’ these poems tenderly, vulnerably, and fearlessly sequence threads of familial bonds, heredity, and Indigenous identity. With a captivating and conversant voice, m.s. RedCherries maps the intersections of the historical with the personal and deftly binds the two like strands of DNA, creating the spark of life that courses through this vital work.” —2024 National Book Awards Judges’ Citation

“mother presents a poignant exploration of Indigenous identity, the relationship between daughters and mothers, and the universal desire to find a way home.” —National Book Foundation

“RedCherries, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, introduces her debut by noting that it is wholly fiction — a touch that accents how novelistic the book is in quilting verse and prose to tell the story of an adoptee reuniting with her birth family.” —The New York Times Book Review

“mother by m.s. Redcherries is the book I would want to be given . . . This is an incredibly powerful book of poetry that is also fiction but it is so real, and singular, as to defy definition, and I defy anyone to read it and come away unchanged.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars, via The Guardian

“A subversive text that challenges ideas about Indigenous identity in both form and function . . . The collection is ultimately a tribute to survival and resilience, evoking the names of massacres and resistances that are personally wounding yet fortified by Red Power pride. A finalist for the National Book Award, this debut work announces RedCherries as a poet capable of giving voice to both the traumas that wound and the empowerment that heals.” —Tribal College Journal

“A poignant collection that isn’t afraid to shatter poetic conventions to create a new kind of storytelling.” —Electric Literature

“A groundbreaking collection in the ever-evolving and increasingly visible realm of Indigenous literature. In its pages, the poem and essay forms blend and melt, creating a linguistic and sensory experience that bends time, place, memory, and space . . . In its careful, personal dissection of the social and political landscapes which uplift some and oppress others, mother is an exploration of the many paths one can take to not only discover and find themselves, but also to find their way home.” —Southern Review of Books

“In a lyrical and haunting story, writer m.s. RedCherries takes an uneven journey through time and memory to find the mother and home she never knew.” —ICT News

“An unforgettable story.” —Arizona Daily Star

“mother is a moving exploration of self-identity and family. In poetry and prose, m.s. RedCherries weaves together oral histories and family lore to construct a portal for a separated family reconstructing a shared history of love, rich cultural heritage, systemic injustice, and loss . . . mother is unique, deviating from rules of form, time, and space to best serve the narrative and the larger considerations it addresses . . . Despite the deep loss threaded throughout, this debut collection beats with resilience and vitality.” —Booklist

“Potent and immersive. . . a confident and arresting account of loss and the search to rebuild community and identity.”—Publishers Weekly

“mother is exquisite. Through these beautiful pieces of prose and poetry, m.s. RedCherries takes us on a journey back not just to the narrators’ birth family but to their cultural legacy. Part elegy and part rallying cry, while mother examines the systemic injustice done to indigenous people, this is more than just a meditation on generational wrongs. RedCherries has rendered an intimate portrait of inheritance—from the spiritual to the genetic—that is, ultimately, a testimony of empowerment in lush language that feels gorgeous and fresh.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last and Olga Dies Dreaming

“This is an extraordinary debut by an innovative new voice in Native American literature. Throughout mother, m.s. RedCherries weaves a multigenerational and polyphonic narrative that spirals across time and space to explore themes of indigenous identity, adoption, residential schools, and reservations. While there is a profound sense of loss and trauma in these pages, there is also a pulsing abundance of Indian resilience and life.” —Craig Santos Perez, National Book Award-winning author of from unincorporated territory [åmot]

“A layered reconstruction of family icons that’s ‘riddled with shadowed humor’ in language as clear and hot as tears.” —Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully

“Visceral, deep, heartbreaking . . . m.s. RedCherries writes with tender and powerful precision about fractured daughters reuniting with lost family in cars and beer and faith and death and love.” —Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man