Life Travels by Tina Harrach Denetclaw

Tina Denetclaw’s poetry collection, Life Travels, is strung with moments of bright reflection and tender celebration of nature, family, the memories we share with those we love, even of the ways the world hurts us. Denetclaw reminds us that, after all, “what sticks in the tread / [is] too often the burr / the broken edge.” In these meditative poems, the past echoes against the present’s surface and appears in a face, yarn crocheted into a blanket in an aunt’s favorite stitch, a beloved chair passed down among the generations. Though Denetclaw’s poems sometimes carry great sorrow along with their beauty, this book will leave you full of “quiet joy for the now / that we have.”

–Francesca Bell, author of What Small Sound

In this graceful debut collection of poems Tina Denetclaw confides sometimes getting lost in her neighborhood but by a smidge of light in the night sky always knowing the way to the center of the galaxy. She gives us her center in the landscape and family that make her life. Her German and Danish ancestors settled the plains of Nebraska and lived “with intention and courage and calm grit.” She sees the landscape of Nebraska through geologic time and the landscape of family through the domestic details of food, a favorite chair, a beloved cat, a broken clock. Some of the strongest poems are love poems to her Diné husband as they face his life-threatening illness with grit and courage.

–Catharine Clark-Sayles, MD, MFA, author of The Telling, The Listening

In Life Travels, poet Tina Denetclaw demonstrates how to balance heart and hearth, perennialism and perseverance, beauty and bravery. In this aptly-titled collection, we travel the many paths—both taken and untaken—of a life. Often enjoyed and sometimes endured, these memories are always deeply considered and carefully crafted into poems, steeped in “quiet joy for the now.”

–Chad Frame, author of Little Black Book and Smoking Shelter