In this sixth collection of stories and verse, award-winning writer Luci Tapahonso finds sacredness in everyday life. Viewing a sunset in a desert sky, listening to her granddaughter recount how she
Tapahonso's newest poetry collection, A Radiant Curve, confirms her place near the top of any list in American literature.
—Studies in American Indian Literatures
Tapahonso celebrates the everyday acts, rituals, and stories that draw people together across the years and across the distances of cultural dispersion.
—Library Journal
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spent her day, or visiting her mother after her father's passing, she finds traces of her own memories, along with echoes of the voices of her Navajo ancestors. The collection also includes an audio
CD of the author reading aloud and her voice is warm and inviting, like the "simmering soup and blue corn meal" of her childhood.
These engaging words draw us into a workaday world that,
magically but never surprisingly, has room for the Diyin Dine'é (the Holy People), Old Salt Woman, and Dawn Boy. When she describes her grandson's First Laugh Ceremony—explaining that it was
originally performed for White Shell Girl, who grew up to be Changing Woman—her account enriches us and we long to hear more. Tapahonso weaves the Navajo language into her work like she weaves
"the first four rows of black yarn" into a rug she is making "for my little grandson, who inherited my father's name: Hastiin Tsétah Naaki Bísóí."
As readers, we find
that we too are surrounded by silent comfort, held lovingly in the confident hands of an accomplished writer who has a great deal to tell us about life.
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