Manifestation Wolverine: The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear

By Ray Young Bear

The American Book Award–winning collection from “The best poet in Indian Country” (Sherman Alexie, New York Times–bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven).

Hailed by the Bloomsbury Review as “the nation’s foremost contemporary Native American poet” and by Sherman Alexie as “the best poet in Indian Country,” Ray Young Bear draws on ancient Meskwaki tradition and modern popular culture to create poems that provoke, astound, and heal.
 
This indispensable volume, which contains three previously published collections—Winter of the Salamander (1979), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001)—as well as Manifestation Wolverine, a brilliant series of new pieces inspired by animistic beliefs, a Lazy-Boy recliner, and the word songs Young Bear sang to his children, is a testament to the singularity of the poet’s talent and the astonishing range of his voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504014144

Reviews for Manifestation Wolverine

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Impulse selection at the library. I liked the title and loved the cover, and hadn't been reading enough poetry lately.

Early in the volume, I kept wanting to give up. This is a long book, quite a commitment, and the early poems tended to the very dark. Even given how many of the references and allusions were unfamiliar, these poems fell like stones in my heart, weighing me down and not giving much light.

But I had scanned through the book randomly in the beginning, enough to get the feeling that I would like the later poems better, so I kept reading. In the middle I was still often tempted to put the book down, but between what I'd scanned from the end and the pleasurable jolt of recognition and familiarity whenever Bear mentioned beadwork kept me going. (I'm such a bead geek.)

The actual collection entitled Manifestation Wolverine, the final collection in this book, is where things finally turned around for me. So, about the last quarter of the book I would give four, maybe five stars, and the rest three. It's hard to explain exactly the nature of the change. It's not like suddenly the poems were happy go lucky waterfalls and butterflies. They were still in the dark woods, but at least a little light was seeping in between the trees.

I think mostly it was just too much to take on such a huge anthology of an unfamiliar poet. If I found a copy of just that last volume, though, I would snatch it up in a heartbeat.