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The Smokehouse Boys

Shaunna Oteka McCovey

96 pp (5.5 x 8.5)
Trade Paper, ISBN: 1-59714-019-8, $11.95

Poems of grace, heartbreak, and wry, beautiful simplicity.

Love begins upriver, at Katamiin, the Karuk center of the world. Here creation was danced into existence; here “the might of a bulldozer does not equal the will of ten thousand years.”

Shaunna Oteka McCovey is a river guide to these places, a cartographer of that which is created, lost, and regained. The old ways are at war—with alcoholism, heroin, and poverty—using ancient weapons, maidenhair, mussel shells, and beargrass. Their heroes are the Brush Dance Boy, Wovoka, and the Smokehouse Boys, who are made of:

1part smoke,
2 parts shadow,
1 part whispering wind,
2 parts sharpshooter,
1/2  singers of old Deerskin Dance songs.

About the Author

Shaunna Oteka McCovey (Yurok/Karuk) wrote her first poem at the age of six while growing up on the Yurok Indian reservation in northern California. She holds master’s degrees in social work and environmental law and a juris doctorate from Vermont Law School. Her poems have appeared in News from Native California, Through the Eye of the Deer, and The Dirt Is Red Here. This is her first full-length book of poetry.