Rivers in My Veins

With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. "Land we live on land," she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for "Acknowledgement Two," a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes.

In groundbreaking forms of her ancestors and for future generations, Briggs introduces profiles of a Yakama treaty fisherman, a great-great-grandmother basket maker, and a Sauk-Suiattle leader calling for accountability, sharing the humanity and modernity of Native peoples. She uses sonnets, pantoums, and haiku as familiar vehicles for readers as she carries them into unfamiliar history and perspectives. She questions our relationship with words about Indigenous peoples by exploring their etymologies. She engages literary ancestors, poets Carolyn Kizer and Janice Gould, re-examining their poetics in her own. Kara Briggs works on environmental issues with tribes on the West Coast and has a background in journalism and higher education. She is a former president of the Native American Journalists Association. She graduated in 2024 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. This is her first poetry collection and her first publication with St. Julian Press.