Kim Shuck, Poet
Laureate of San Francisco, writes a stunning long poem about her journey across
the United States, what becomes a personal migration along its waterways. She names
and transforms history, politics, nature’s beings, and her own ties to Cherokee
Nation, of which she is an enrolled member. She notices “Selu” (corn in
Cherokee), orchards, “dead gas stations,” and “ravens in parking lots.” In the
flow of scenes, Shuck articulates an identity, “Americans are defined/by
crossing water/Atlantic, Mississippi, Rio Grande, Pacific.” Place names of
Latin, Spanish, and Algonkian origin wend together. An unanswered question
haunts the verse as the poet moves in a terrain of observation and imagination.
Readers join Shuck in creating possible responses.
Truck stop coffee
In through the passes
The satisfying
watersheds whose punch lines we know
Here through the fog on
the hillside
Through the sunwink and
traffic of the floodplain
Here again among
handprint bridges and watersong
Here at the straights
Whose water?
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Kim Shuck is a Tsalagi (Cherokee)/Euro-American poet, author,
weaver, and beadwork artist born in San Francisco, California. She belongs
to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora and is a member of the Cherokee
Nation of Oklahoma. In 2017, Mayor Ed Lee named Shuck as the
7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco.
Other awards include a PEN Oakland Censorship Award, National Laureate
Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, KQED Local Hero Award, American
Indian Heritage Month, Mentor of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native
Writers and Storytellers, Native Writers of the Americas First Book, Diane
Decorah Award, and a Mary Tallmountain Award. Previous books of poetry are Deer
Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7, (City Lights Publishers),
Murdered Missing (Foothills Publishing), Sidewalk Ndn, chapbook
(FootHills Publishing), Clouds Running In, (Taurean Horn Press ), Smuggling
Cherokee (Greenfield Review Press, Poetry Foundation bestseller list, SPD
Books bestseller list. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles
(1998) from San Francisco State University. She has taught American Indian
Studies at San Francisco State University and was an artist-in-residence at
the de Young Museum in June 2010 with Michael Horse.
