The Island of Lost Luggage

The Island of Lost Luggage
By Janet McAdams
75 pp. / 6.00 in x 9.00 in / 2000
Paper (978-0-8165-2056-5)

Series
- First Book Award Series

Related Interest
- Poetry

". . . at the Island of Lost Luggage, they line up:
the disappeared, the lost children, the Earharts
of modern life. It's your bad luck to die in the cold
wars of certain nations. But

Winner of the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award

She has a keen, tart mind and a huge inquisitiveness, which, given her sympathy for victims of America's injustice, have led her to witness or to assist at one revolutionary protest after another. She approaches each event wide-eyed, a born observer.

—Poetry

Those who might consign the book unread to the 'Native American' literary ghetto will miss work to which those who attempt to keep up with developments in contemporary poetry ought to pay attention.

—World Literature Today

A volume full of truncated plots; beautiful and troubling images . . . meditations on resistance and complicity.

—Women's Review of Books

Achingly beautiful, these poems champion the abused, the oppressed.

—North American Review

in the line at Unclaimed
Baggage, no one mourns for the sorry world
that sent them here . . ."

The abused. The oppressed. The terrified victims of institutionalized insanity. Making daring connections between the personal and the political, Janet McAdams draws new lines in the conflict between the new and old worlds as she redefines the struggle to remain human.
This award-winning collection of poetry forges surprising links among seemingly unrelated forms of violence and resistance in today's world: war in Central America, abuses against Nature, the battleground of the bedroom. McAdams evokes the absurdity of everyday existence as she sends out a new call for social responsibility.
The Island of Lost Luggage is the poetry winner of the 1999 First Book Awards competition of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

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