Cicadas

"Roberta Hill is a poet who understands struggle, and generously imparts her passion for renewal. Her work always stems from the toughness of a compassionate survivor."--Louise Erdrich

Cicadas: New & Selected Poems gathers together seventy-five poems from Roberta Hill's two previous poetery collections, Star Quilt and Philadephia Flowers, along with a generous selection of new poems, culled from the past thirty years. Roberta's poems are powerful lyrical expressions of love and respect for family, friends, fellow artists with a wide context for contemporary politics especially as protest against imperial governments, class conflicts, and racial injustice.

Roberta's poems are always informed by her deep knowledge of native culture and respect for the earth and fellow humanity.

You carried the cicada to the alder tree

whose leafy shadow made the yard an arbor.

After you left, his buzz song eased me

through lonely afternoons of sun and wind.

Desire changed his skeleton.

Desire--that green shoot in a gut.

That tendril twining with memory until new life emerges

on the opposite side

from where we first supposed. He lured his mate

to the arbor. Even after you were gone,

all the years you loved me

still sounded.

Roberta Hill is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Luna, and Prairie Schooner. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Award and a Chancellor's Award from the University of Wisconsin.