University Of New Mexico Press: 489 books

Breaths is a poetic exploration of Budo (the Japanese martial arts) and Zen. It delves into the relationship between these two traditions and projects their spirit onto the textures of everyday life. The poems balance action, energy, meditation, and contemplation on how to live attentively and actively...

Before recovery comes the preparation to recover. In City of Slow Dissolve, John Chávez takes readers through this journey—the “slow dissolve,” the unpacking and re-packing of self that must take place before healing can begin. Fusing language poetry, lyric, and narrative, Chávez uses syntactical...

“Welcome to Kate Gale’s world. There are glass houses, a glass orchestra, sex on the roof. . . . Kate Gale knows her Bible and plays whatever music she wants on that musical instrument—but her música is always fresh, and it achieves wisdom.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa“The...

This debut collection explores the vestiges of war and the effects those can have on a family. Carlson excavates the personal experience of violence and abuse that follows a traumatized soldier home and also reveals veins of redemption.

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honor traditional ways of life and culture.

Around the world, indigenous peoples are returning to traditional foods produced by traditional methods of subsistence. The goal of controlling their own food systems, known as food sovereignty, is to reestablish healthy lifeways to combat contemporary diseases such as diabetes and obesity. This is...

Schaefer shares the individual stories of seven people—rancher, sheepherder, homesteader, town settler, soldier, miner, and cowboy—in this collection. He tells the tales as they can only be told: in the open spaces of the Old West. In these memorable narratives Schaefer depicts the unique conflicts...

Their buzzes, beeps, bells, and tunes have disrupted countless classes, movies, and meals; public auditoriums now have signs posted prominently asking people to turn their cell phones off; cities such as Santa Fe have banned their use in automobiles. But these little connection gadgets have become...

Powwow's coming, hear the beat? Powwow's coming, dancing feet. Powwow's coming, hear the drum? Powwow's coming, everyone! Frustrated as a schoolteacher not being able to find good instructional materials on American Indians, Linda Boyden has bypassed the tired stereotype of Indians on horseback...

Cecelia Capture Welles, an Indian law student and mother of two, is jailed on her thirtieth birthday for drunk driving. Held on an old welfare fraud charge, she reflects back on her life on the reservation in Idaho, her days as an unwed mother in San Francisco, her marriage to a white liberal, and...

What happens when two oft-divorced and middle-aged sex fiends tie the knot again? Birds do it, bees do it, and Roger and Zelda do it whenever their teenage kids aren’t looking. Their ecstasy is boundless. But when the darker side of Paradise rears its comical head, they suddenly find themselves...

Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual...

The Umbanda religion summons the spirits of old slaves and Brazilian Indians to speak through the mouths of mediums in trance. Its practitioners worship African gods, often calling them by the names of Catholic saints; simultaneously embrace the concepts of karma, reincarnation, and Christian charity;...

Dichos, or proverbs, offer a daily source of strength and inspiration in Spanish-speaking households all over the world. In this book about growing up in Manila with a Filipina grandmother, Maria Paz Eleizegui Weir shares the centuries-old dichos she learned from her abuelita: wisdom that is still...