2019 NCIBA Golden Poppy Award Winner - Poetry
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San Francisco's 7th poet laureate--a Native American and native San
Franciscan--explores urban space and the natural world.
Deer Trails is a strongly elegiac evocation of a San Francisco that
lies buried under its contemporary urban landscape, but can still be
found peeking through. Native American and native San Franciscan Kim
Shuck is the city's seventh poet laureate, and in these poems she
celebrates the enduring presence of indigenous San Francisco as a form
of resistance to gentrification, urbanization, and the erasure of
memory.
Praise for Deer Trails and Kim Shuck
Kim Shuck's serpentine lyrics sing the streets, hills, trees, fog, and
rain of San Francisco, as well as the city's deeper cartography of
watersheds, village sites, shellmounds, trade paths, and deer trails. As
you navigate this book, listen closely: the poems transform into maps,
prayers, and medicine that offer healing, wonderment, and joy in our
difficult times. 'Travel grateful, ' the poet lovingly advises. 'Travel
safe.'--Craig Santos Perez
Deer Trails is a work of maturity and passion from one of Native
America's best poets. Kim Shuck is a poet whose dedication to indigenous
reality is unquestionable and admirable. The Tsalagi people live in a
cherished memory of honor and peace. The poems in Deer Trails are a
testament to these ends. I am proud to call her sister.--Lance
Henson
Made of leaps of beginning after beginning of images that sound as well
as visually show nature's humanity in a montage--naming en route to
organic epiphanies--that's the idiomatic brilliance of Kim Shuck's
actually quite sophisticated poems of simplicity.--Jack Hirschman
Shuck's poetry reminds us that you can believe in the blue note; our
elders' speeches that we dance near. Her poems seamlessly walk the
aggregates of human presence and voice all of nature's directions. Shuck
reminds us of the omniscience of the people in this dictatorship of
dimes; the omniscience of the people in all sketches about genocide.
Hers is the only way to look at San Francisco. A prayer in the mind of a
warrior.--Tongo Eisen-Martin
