(dis)Orient

James Thomas Stevens

Poetry | 2005 | 28 pages | $10.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9743181-3-4 | Saddle-sewn binding

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Borrowing from the North American Jesuit Relations and the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses of the Jesuits in China, and woven into sensual personal narrative, this long poem focuses on the obsession of charting.

Charting the lakes and rivers of lands on both sides of the Bering Strait, charting the borders of our own containers. Mapping as a means of showing greatness or inferiority. Do we map our borders based on what is reported or echoed back by others?

If the savages are to be believed…

…and we even traced out from their reports a map of the whole of the new country.

Orient is an exploration of borders, based partially on the ideas of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, partially on history, but mostly of the self experienced though the other.

“James Stevens’s eloquent new poem moves from the moment of disorientation—“separation sounds, / soft as wool / pulled from a spindle”—to charting and navigating a new inner as well as outer terrain. He binds longing and discovery with a singular, astonishing touch.”

— Arthur Sze

James Thomas Stevens is the author of Tokinish (First Intensity Press) and Combing the Snakes from His Hair (Michigan State UP) and The Mutual Life (Cambridge). He is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe, holds an MFA from Brown University, and is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient. He has published in over thirty journals and done readings from Stirling, Scotland to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He currently teaches English and Native American Studies at the State University of New York at Fredonia.