Praise for You and I, and Spilyáy

A Drumbeat for Justice

By Poet Sarah K. Carey

Kara Brigg’s capacious and deeply moving second collection, You and I, and Spilyay, is a drumbeat for justice, a love letter to her ancestors and Native American heritage, and a poetic documentary of the people, places, and traditions she holds dear. With a journalist’s eye for detail and a mystic’s celebration of the surreal, Briggs explores faith and doubt, life and death, and what it means to witness to what happens in between these states of being and awareness. “I only admit to prayer when I say generations work together/to create this place and a place in the next world//this is how we live between this place and that place…” she writes in “Relative Passing,” the title itself carrying the double meaning of death and time.

In four sections of poems that create their own rhythms, primarily in free verse, we find saltwater and yodel, treaty salmon and fish guts, and remembered familial traditions and habits. In “At Two Years Old,” Briggs reimagines a grandfather’s dice-throwing in a field of cotton alongside farmworkers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, from Black people who fled the Jim Crow South to Oklahomans whose families escaped the Dust Bowl to end up in San Joaquin Valley. Briggs’s poems blend stories from her childhood and coming of age in the Pacific Northwest with stories passed down to her from previous generation. At the same time, these stories offer prismatic and diverse insights into the people from multiple cultures she has encountered along the way. These poems also address exploitation in thought-provoking ways, as in “Insatiable Beings,” which examines the irony of using tribal masks in a museum exhibit dedicated to a tribal chief, when “there was never a time in history before now when masks were preserved/for posterity in museum vaults or on the walls of stately homes or corporate offices/there was never a moment masks existed for anything more than ceremony…”

Briggs’s eyes and ears miss nothing, and the lens through which she perceives the world is one we all could learn from. To accurately recount and interpret one’s own history in light of ancestral inheritances and to reconcile those with contemporary personal and political concerns is no small task, but Briggs fulfills that task and more, in poems as full of light as they are of darkness, living in the knowledge of their own transience. In “Women Friends,” she captures the balm of a friendship forged through the act of making — a crocheted baby blanket and the memories it evokes years later. Collectively, these poems offer a plea for humanity and unity across time, which has no true boundaries in Briggs’s world, and across cultures, which so often do. This book is both a thought-provoking read and a gift to the spirit.