This new volume of poems by Lance Henson is bilingual, as an essential trace of saying necessarily in many languages – southern cheyenne/tsistsistas, english (which for Lance is the enemy’s language), italian. Entities/Entities manifests a word-intensity which becomes more and more powerful and rarefied. It evokes fragments of light, like a subtle mist of the Spirit embodied in the tsistsistas language, and in a river of many other languages, minor, with their voices coming from the limit, the border, the rim, the margin, from the edge of the world. For this reason, these voices know how to speak directly into the heart of things, awakening us from the mechanical torpor of the dominator paradigm, with its hypertechnology, born to robotise us and silence the voices of poets who, awakening us, always carry truth and beauty.
Lance Henson
was born in Washington, D.C., on September 20, 1944; he is Cheyenne, Oglala, and Cajun and a member of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers Brotherhood, the Native American Church (the cult of peyote) and the American Indian Movement. He often represented his tribe in the Indigenous Peoples Working Group at the United Nations in Geneva. He published his first collection of poetry, Keeper of Arrows, in 1971. Since then he has published fifty collections, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He is also co-author of two plays.