“Grandchildren meet their grandparents at the end,” Denise Low says, “as tragic figures. We remember their decline and deaths. . . . The story we see as grandchildren is like a garden covered by snow, just outlines visible.” Low brings to light deeply held secrets of Native ancestry as she recovers the life story of her Kansas grandfather, Frank Bruner (1889–1963). She remembers her childhood in Kansas, where her grandparents remained at a distance, personally and physically, from their grandchildren, despite living only a few miles away. As an adult, she comes to understand her grandfather’s Delaware (Lenape) legacy of persecution and heroic survival in the southern plains of the early 1900s, where the Ku Klux Klan attacked Native people along with other ethnic minorities. As a result of such experiences, the Bruner family fled to Kansas City and suppressed their non-European ancestry as completely as possible. As Low unravels this hidden family history of the Lenape diaspora, she discovers the lasting impact of trauma and substance abuse, the deep sense of loss and shame related to suppressed family emotions, and the power of collective memory. Low traveled extensively around Kansas, tracking family history until she understood her grandfather’s political activism and his healing heritage of connections to the land. In this moving exploration of her grandfather’s life, the former poet laureate of Kansas evokes the beauty of the Flint Hills grasslands, the hardships her grandfather endured, and the continued discovery of his teachings.

The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (American Indian Lives)

Biographies & Memoirs

Low, Denise

Community & Culture

Bison Books

Tulip Elegies: An Alchemy of Writing is a remarkable set of interlocking poems and essays. They trace the alchemy of writing itself, as symbols and dream imagery reveal themselves. They begin with loss, when the writer's father suffered a debilitating stroke. They travel through gardens, European alchemy, alphabets, calendars, and the writing process itself to assert faith in all expressions of human life.

Tulip Elegies: An Alchemy of Writing

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Penthe Pub

Touching the Sky: Essays

History

Americas

Langston Hughes in Lawrence: Photographs and Biographical Resources

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood  (1902-1915) in Lawrence, Ks. This biography includes 60 B&W photos of Lawrence places connected to Hughes, along with maps and a family tree of known African, American Indian, and White ancestry. A story emerges of his prominent abolitionist grandparents, Charles and Mary Langston, who lived in the Lawrence area from 1870, and their struggle for education and civil rights. Many buildings from their and Langston Hughes's time survive in Lawrence, a place where the spirit of political activism is still alive.  "Langston Hughes in Lawrence is a remarkable visual portrait of a place that nurtured a man known for his words more than one hundred years after his birth.  We owe a debt of gratitude to Low and Weso for bringing Hughes' boyhood home alive, for returning us to those years between 1902 and 1915. Here we can see and imagine the world that made its permanent mark on the foremost poet of the 20th century."   -Maryemma Graham, Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, University of Kansas   "No previous scholar of Langston Hughes' boyhood in Lawrence has examined the complexities in Hughes's multiracial family or in his community with the comprehensiveness and insight that Low and Weso provide in their new study."  -Elizabeth Schultz, University of Kansas.     "This important book gives us a more intimate picture of Hughes's people and places. The ground-breaking research, vivid photographs, and detailed genealogy show us the roots of this legendary writer's life."  -Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Goddard College

Weso, T.F. Pecore

Arts & Literature

Mammoth Pubns

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood (1902-1915) in Lawrence, Ks. This biography includes 60 B&amp;W photos of Lawrence places connected to Hughes, along with text, maps, and a family tree of known African, American Indian, and White ancestry. A story emerges of his prominent abolitionist grandparents, Charles and Mary Langston, who lived in the Lawrence area from 1870, and their struggle for education and civil rights. Many buildings from their and Langston Hughes's time survive in Lawrence, a place where the spirit of political activism is still alive. "Langston Hughes in Lawrence is a remarkable visual portrait of a place that nurtured a man known for his words more than one hundred years after his birth. We owe a debt of gratitude to Low and Weso for bringing Hughes's boyhood home alive, for returning us to those years between 1902 and 1915. Here we can see and imagine the world that made its permanent mark on the foremost poet of the 20th century." -Maryemma Graham, Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, University of Kansas "No previous scholar of Langston Hughes' boyhood in Lawrence has examined the complexities in Hughes's multiracial family or in his community with the comprehensiveness and insight that Low and Weso provide in their new study." Elizabeth Schultz, University of Kansas.

Mammoth

Poetry. Native American Studies. Denise Low's MÉLANGE BLOCK maps a vivid landscape of Native American and settler lives. High Plains country, volcanic fields, wine country, and ghost towns are among the sites where Low casts spells of her beautifully felt language. Natural processes, like crystallization and aggregation, appear as topics and then reflect in the language itself, which becomes its own geography. Through her lens, the American continent patterns a new poetics in this innovative work. Very conscious of her identities as a person of Native and European heritages, she navigates through past and future until they join in one continuous history. Rain Taxi's reviewer said of her work, it is "surgical with the familiar and charming with the ancient." Midwest Review of Books notes her "talent for tilling the surface and digging deep beneath topsoil to unearth legacies." "Denise Low's poems have the effect of intensifying everything: nature, history, even the present moment. Her language has had its soft fascia removed from around the muscular nouns, verbs and vivid images. 'Particles vibrate,' she says and shows, 'inside limestone ledges.' These are tough poems, in which every single word has an edge. That's the message, here, whether the subject is ancestry or 'fog over asphalt.' Take the eye of the backyard fox. Take the silicate grasses. Line by line, Denise Low elevates and thereby honors the details of our lives and our land. She has created poetry anew, right in our midst; as she, herself, would vividly say, 'Weathered outbuildings shelter crazy prophets.'"—Robert Stewart "'Aim for the eye,' Denise Low writes and in her poetry, she constantly threads the most precise images through the the sturdy music of each poem's world. Low speaks with intelligence, art, and originality. Altogether, the poems in this collection delve into the nuances of various elements of a life to show us an expanded understanding of the layers of reality. 'May all our bones rest in peace,' Low writes at the end of 'Flint Hill Lullabies,' showing us how history travels in our bones and the bones of wherever we live."—Caryn Mirriam- Goldberg "Revealing a highly observant eye and sensitive ear, this mélange (mixture of styles, shapes, colors, or rock matrix) deals honestly with a landscape of subjects—from growing old to a family freezing one bitter winter to Dega 'rasping / charcoal against grained paper.' Their clarity and compression encompass us all."—Mary Harwell Sayler

Melange Block

Red Mountain Press

Fiction. Native American Studies. Jackalope in Denise Low's trickster stories is a 21st century figure as real as Bigfoot. Part antelope and part rabbit, this denizen of the grasslands has a Twitter account and a trusty road car. He loves Native American tales as well as Old West adventures. Jack's social life includes encounters with Roswell aliens, Jayhawks, and Chupacabra (Goat Sucker). Bawdy humor is Jackalope's lifeblood, so join Jack as he (or sometimes she) savors urban legends and juniper- based martinis. "In JACKALOPE, the mythic gender- bending figure, Jaq/Jack, takes us along on a magical mystery tour where s/he meets up with other trickster- cryptids. Jaq/Jack leaps out of the two-dimensional entrapment of postcards to claim his/her own spaces between worlds. One wonders why Jackalope has had to wait so long to have a say."—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Director of The Red Earth MFA "JACKALOPE recounts the seriocomic encounters of a Native American trickster who travels through a world that's 'part factual and part mythological, just like everything else.' In the 'intergender' Jackalope/Jaqalope Kelley's picaresque sojourns in bars (mostly), truck stops, and galleries, history meets tall tale, dream and vision worry the mundane, and humor functions as a salve for wounds of the long-oppressed. Here is a multi- faceted and incisive look at America from the viewpoint of its indigenous people and spirits."—William Trowbridge, Missouri Poet Laureate "JACKALOPE is a perfect blend of stories, poetry, and strangeness. Denise Low has created a collection that is simultaneously myth and not-myth, a shining delight."—Kij Johnson, Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards winner "Trickster takes center stage in Denise Low's JACKALOPE, a collection of prose and poetry recounting the adventures of its title character, Jackalope Kelley. This anthropomorphic animal is the cryptid on postcards you see at gas stations across the American Midwest—a rabbit with two iconic pronghorn antlers. Jackalope Kelley shifts between male and female identities: Jack when he's a man, Jaq when she's a woman. He drinks a gin and tonic in a Twitter bar. She passes through Seattle, Santa Fe, Minneapolis, Colorado, and Roswell, among other places. He vomits when he sees the head of one of his ancestors mounted above the door in a Wyoming bar. And she searches for a gynecologist—or does he need a urologist? All of these scenes give the book a playful feel, but there's also plenty of time for reflection. In quieter moments, Jackalope tries to explain his complicated heritage to others. ... This merging of shape-shifting identities with shape-shifting trickster narratives is no accident. The language of the book is steeped in the Native American mythologies and vocabularies that Low understands so well."—Ben Pfeiffer, Interviews Editor, The Rumpus

Jackalope

Poetry. Native American Studies. "The natural elements are honored and reclaimed in all their vital glory in Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT. Water, land, wind, and language rise up and dazzle. Low splinters syntax and line to signal presence, absence, spirit, and light. These are also elegiac poems for a father, sister, and grandparents, and gloss the history and resilience of the Lenape, Cherokee, Cheyenne, and Kiowa people. Low translates nature into human song and back again. This is a riveting and urgent collection by an accomplished poet, who courts a hummingbird so that we may witness it 'bullet dive' and open a portal into another world."--Hadara Bar-Nadav "Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT extends her poetics to the realm of natural magic: Lyric embedded with Story. History embedded with Myth. English challenged with Native languages. Imagery enriched with Sound. Pop Culture meshed with ritual Culture. The built Environment genuflecting to the natural Environment. SHADOW LIGHT is masterful poetry by an accomplished poet; this is poetry I wish I had written myself."--Jeanetta Calhoun Mish "Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT deals with sight, appearances, and apparitions. Shades slide through layers of history, layers of earth, sidewise in a single line, 'peripheral twilight / black-and-white lexicon / flicker flit freeze.' Low conveys liminal perceptions by leaving enough unsaid. In these painterly poems, physical features emanate tones and patterns. SHADOW LIGHT is brilliant--don't miss it."--Joseph Harrington "SHADOW LIGHT is a sweep of polarities--life / death, past / present, upheaval / peace. This spot-on writing casts variegated light on our world--flycatchers, curlew, little people, opossum--and other travelers of day and night."--Diane Glancy

Shadow Light

A 2021 Kansas Notable Book&nbsp; Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors presents the images of Native warriors--Wild Hog, Porcupine, and Left Hand, as well as possibly Noisy Walker (or Old Man), Old Crow, Blacksmith, and Tangled Hair--as they awaited probable execution in the Dodge City jail in 1879.&nbsp;When Sheriff Bat Masterson provided drawing materials, the men created war books that were coded to avoid confrontation with white authorities and to narrate survival from a Northern Cheyenne point of view. The prisoners used the ledger-art notebooks to maintain their cultural practices during incarceration and as gifts and for barter with whites in the prison where they struggled to survive. The ledger-art notebooks present evidence of spiritual practice and include images of contemporaneous animals of the region, hunting, courtship, dance, social groupings, and a few war-related scenes. Denise Low and Ramon Powers include biographical materials from the imprisonment and subsequent release, which extend the historical arc of Northern Cheyenne heroes of the Plains Indian Wars into reservation times. Sources include selected ledger drawings, army reports, letters, newspapers, and interviews with some of the Northern Cheyenne men and their descendants. Accounts from a firsthand witness of the drawings and composition of the ledgers themselves give further information about Native perspectives on the conflicted history of the North American West in the nineteenth century and beyond. This group of artists jailed after the tragedy of the Fort Robinson Breakout have left a legacy of courage and powerful art.

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors

Arts & Photography

Powers, Ramon

History & Criticism

University Of Nebraska Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Low, Denise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Low, Denise

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Low, Denise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (American Indian Lives)

Tulip Elegies: An Alchemy of Writing

Touching the Sky: Essays

Langston Hughes in Lawrence: Photographs and Biographical Resources

Langston Hughes in Lawrence: Photographs and Biographical Resources

Melange Block

Jackalope

Shadow Light

Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors

The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (American Indian Lives)