The woman who haunts the book of Job

As Diane Glancy studied the book of Job while creating this collection of original poems and poetic prose, she realized that the biblical text was haunted. Suffering and loss experienced by Native Americans seeped out. Stories from her own Cherokee ancestry streamed between the verses, overlaying and recoloring the narrative, bleeding out historically distant and emotionally immediate meaning. She writes, “The particular poetics of the lamentations of Job in Uz and the Native American on the North American continent are my heritage. A personal sense of loss.”

Glancy’s book fills gaps of understanding and probes instances of suffering in a creative composition that keeps readers rocking forward in anticipation of another interpolation or surprising insight. Researched facts, explanations of the author’s literary intentions, and presuppositions of her mind are set between her poems. These bridges of language lead back and forth across time and space, turning in and out through the poet’s biography.

One of the language fragments states that there is an “energy-field in poetics.” Glancy’s book transfers the energy buried in the book of Job, compressing emotion from the story, splintering conventional interpretation, and redirecting attention from the text here and there—to Custer’s Last Stand, to the author’s emotional memories of her family, to the dreamscapes of highway travel. She writes: “Poetry is cartography. An imagined mapping of the wilderness for an understanding of the wilderness, or as much of the wilderness as can be understood.”