A white woman navigates her fear and uncertainty to learn the ways of the people she called savages, until she begins to dream €œin Dakota, syllables sliding / on my tongue like tender pieces of meat.€ An African man, on display as a cannibal at the World€s Columbian Exposition in 1893, sees into the future: €œhumiliations heaped up / as on overfilled plates . . . / . . . a country that casually / consumes its own.€ A woman holds the gray-blue barrel of a gun in her mouth, €œthe taste familiar / as her own blood.€

With an unexcelled command of narrative verse, Lisa Ch¡vez tells the stories of American lives across more than a century. Whether retelling nineteenth-century captivity narratives or depicting contemporary American women confronting addiction and despair, Ch¡vez investigates issues of identity and self-definition in the face of an often harsh and unremitting history.

Her story-poems explore the ways in which people have been made captive€"whether to racism or national policy, to bad marriages or alcoholism, to poverty or emotion€"from the Inuit woman birthing a son among strangers to the wife now deranged by desire for another man: €œHe€s the smoky slow-burn of chipotle on the tongue. My golden idol. My gospel revival. He€s hashish sweet and languorous€"my body€s one desire.€

In the end, Ch¡vez shows us a New World of promise in which an alchemist€s assistant summons stories from stones by calling their names with €œclicks of her tongue, / syllables of silver, turquoise, and jade,€ and a Native woman discovers her true power in an Alaskan bar. Passionate and political, In an Angry Season is a work of startling depth and breadth€"an American history in poetry€"that asks us what it means to be civilized.