Product Description

Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan explores her lifelong love of the living world and all its inhabitants. "We want to live as if there is no other place," Hogan tells us, "as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life." In offering praise to sky, earth, water, and animals, she calls us to witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. In Dwellings, Hogan takes us on a spiritual quest borne out of the deep past and offers a more hopeful future as she seeks new visions and lights ancient fires. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #230818 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393322477
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Novelist (Mean Spirit) and poet (Seeing Through the Sun) Hogan branches into nonfiction with this slender volume of meditations on the natural world. She successfully couples a poet's appreciation of phrasing and rhythm with Native American sensibilities and stories. Throughout, Hogan exquisitely examines both natural and internal landscapes. She writes beautifully about animals without anthropomorphizing them and, in so doing, explores what it means to be human. Herself a Chickasaw, Hogan is able to bring a diverse cultural perspective to her analysis of how people relate to nature. She concludes, "We must wonder what of value can ever be spoken from lives that are lived outside of life, without a love or respect for the land and other lives." Although 11 of the 16 essays have been previously published, they come together to form an invigorating whole. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Dwellings is Chickasaw Indian poet and novelist Hogan's (The Book of Medicines, LJ 7/93) first book of nonfiction. In this collection of short essays, many previously published in literary journals, she describes various aspects of nature and problems she perceives in current attitudes toward it. Hogan's lyrical writing style draws us into her experiences in Central America, her Chickasaw homeland, and her current home in Colorado, showing us portraits of the natural world in each spot. Her strong orientation toward the environment shines through in each section, as she encourages her readers to see themselves as a small part of the whole that is our ecosystem. The pieces come together to reflect the author's profound respect for the earth and prompt us to feel the same. For literary and ecology collections.?Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Poet and novelist Hogan brings her feeling for language and story to these quietly beautiful and provocative musings on the nature of nature. A Chickasaw, Hogan is deeply involved with trying to relearn the "tribal knowings of thousands of years," revelations about the mysteries of life we've devalued, then forgotten. Hogan does succeed in tapping into some forgotten wisdom in her essays, which, though concise, cover and transcend a great deal of territory. Some relate personal experiences, such as participating in a sweat lodge ceremony or observing snakes, eagles, bats, wolves, flamingos, fish, and termites; and other essays focus on the implications of scientific endeavors, such as teaching chimpanzees sign language or the curious coupling of technology and hope inherent in the Voyager's Interstellar Record, that sound and photo album from Earth for the universe. Hogan writes again and again of the "circular infinity" of life and death, of how air, earth, and water commingle and transform each other, how flowers bloom even in a place as blasted as Hiroshima. The earth has a much stronger will than we do, Hogan tells us, a truth we should acknowledge and respect. Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

Inspirational essays on the natural world
Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, and poet, writes some of the most beautiful prose of any living Americxan writer. When she writes nature essays, as in this collection, her style is not that of the journalist (like, say, John McPhee) or even the activist (Rick Bass). Instead, her words are imbued with beauty and wisdom and spirituality. While I hesitate to use the term "Native American writer" to describe Hogan because I believe any such terminology to be limiting, in her case it is necessary because her Chickasaw background informs so much of her work. The plains of Oklahoma, snakes, dreams, a suspicion of technology, and bats all feature prominently in her writing. Hogan doesn't always deal well with the specifics of ecology--she suggests, for example, that wolves never predate on livestock, which of course is an oversimplification of lupine behavior--but she writes extremely well about the importance of human beings seeking a spiritual connection with the natural world. I highly recommend this book, particularly to anyone wishing to teach high school students about the spirituality of nature.

So much in such a little book!
This book is amazing in its multitude of ideas about life! Practically every sentence makes an amazing statement that causes you to stop and think. Plus, Hogan is obviously an avid reader for her book is stuffed with other readers, scholars, and scientist's words and thoughts. If you're interested in the mysteries of life, this is a book you can't afford to pass up!

'Dwellings' a good feminist nature study
In "Dwellings," Linda Hogan, whose last name is a type of home, showcases her uniquely feminist, naturalist, Native American perspective in a series of first-person narratives. Each addresses some aspect of our innate connection to the natural kingdom, either as an exploiter of it or a victim, like in fire and decay.

Hogan says caves are feminine, womb-like, and have the power to give visions and inspiration to those who dwell in them.

"We are welcome here. I love this inner earth, its murmuring heartbeat, the language of what will consume us. Above is the beautiful earth that we have come from. Below is heat, stone, fire. I am within the healing of nature, held in earth's hand."

Hogan's incisive, yet lilting prose yields nuggets of loamy golden-ness. The copy I read was dog-eared and underlined by its owner.