by Allisa Cherry
October 6, 2026
We by Layli Long Soldier; Graywolf Press; 208 pages; $20.00.
When Layli Long Soldier’s groundbreaking book Whereas was published in 2017, it introduced a necessary contemporary poetics by doing forensic work right on the page. Interrogating and dismantling the bureaucratic, often contrary syntax of the 2009 “Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans,” this debut earned Long Soldier both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize that year, establishing her as a poet of compositional resistance. Now with her much-anticipated second collection, We, Long Soldier invokes a word of dual resonance and opens with an invitation to “interact with the title of the book,” We, a foundational collective pronoun that speaks to our connection to another or others. Long Soldier also shows us that with an accent mark above the e, Wé is Lakota for “blood,” spilled or shared. Addressing topics that resist exploration in a single form or discipline, Long Soldier moves beyond text, using visual art, spatial design, and multidisciplinary media to create what trans-indigenous theorists might define as a refusal of colonial linguistics. In We, the text is no longer just a site of legal dispute, but an expansive canvas where typography, lineation, and visual media converge to map a collective and sovereign presence that English alone cannot contain.
The reader encounters this refusal of colonial syntax in practice in the multidisciplinary piece "Now You Will Listen." Here, Long Soldier decenters the perpetrator of the victim-perpetrator binary in preference of a communal and matrilineal healing. Contextualizing her son’s education within an American school system that continues to harm its Native students, Long Soldier expounds on the ongoing discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at Indian boarding schools, institutions that were designed for child internment and cultural erasure. Long Soldier refuses to perform grief for the colonizer’s gaze. Instead, she turns to her family, contending with their trauma within the protective bond between mother and child. Out of their historic grief, the two collaboratively create Carrier; the mixed-media artwork featured on the book’s cover. As Long Soldier writes, “My child and I. My child and I together. / All that __________ of our feelings, what could we do but make.” Throughout “Now You Will Listen,” the redacted blank spaces may signify the failure of English to name such grief. But there are also moments where the redactions read as a tender effort to protect the innermost, the unsayable, to keep it from the state that perpetuates such violence against Native children.
Where “Now You Will Listen” uses visual redaction to shield communal grief from the state’s gaze, “184 X’s” trains her eye outward to interrogate the state’s historic record. In this piece, Long Soldier directly engages the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, a document designed to establish land boundaries between the US government and all of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Hinono’ei, and the Niitsitapi nations, and ultimately used to control and oppress them. By repeating the mark of the “X” exactly 184 times, each time representing the name of a leader coerced into signing a document written in a language they couldn’t read, Long Soldier imagines what an “X” marked on a state document or map might also mean. She writes, “X marks the tangled language used to distract or dull the senses. To this, beware, a poet is especially alert.”
The critique of “184 X’s” lays the groundwork for “Constellations,” a stunning 22-page visual sequence that serves as an act of restoration. Eschewing the linear grid of a contract, or even much contemporary poetry, she returns each leader’s name to a powerful visual of shaded spheres and floating text. What makes the architecture of “Constellation” so exceptional is how it compels the reader to slow down and meditate on each individual name, Turning these 22 pages transforms the act of reading into a quiet ceremony. No longer reduced to the bureaucratic ”X” that dispossessed them, the names of the elders are reimagined as stars clustered within the Wichahpi Oyate (Star Nation) and the field of the page ceases to be an instrument of the state, becoming, instead, a cosmic map of relationship and survivance.
Long Soldier’s spatial innovation continues in her "Obligations" series, where the traditional page serves as a legend for a large-scale installation piece. Originally laser-cut into heavy cotton-paper sheets bound with copper wire into a twelve-foot Lakota star quilt, these poems deconstruct the linear, coercive reading habits of Western poetry. Arranged in the shape of a diamond, the text allows for multi-directional navigation: a reader can descend vertically through any single column or cross-read diagonally across the diamond’s axis. One way of reading yields a trajectory of resilience ("As we / embrace / ties to / the future... we shift / into light"), while another confronts the brutal recurrence of loss ("As we / resist / the past / we fail / to question / the grief…/ across our faces"). By allowing multiple poems to exist within a single form, Long Soldier refuses the idea of one authoritative narrative of Indigenous endurance. Bound together, the star quilt becomes a living space where memory, grief, and ancestral potentialities remain in continuous flux.
We is an excellent study in process, creation, and structure. But to stop there is to miss the heart of Long Soldier’s project. This collection's brilliance is couched in how her expansive use of form is tied to an abiding pathos that insists on community, family, and the survival of Indigenous futures despite centuries of state inference. Whether she is dissecting the cruel administrative logic of a nineteenth century treaty, exploring the vulnerable interiorities of families navigating hostile educational systems, restoring the rightful names of her elders, or laser-cutting and mapping an entirely new multi-directional form onto the traditional Lakota star quilt, Long Soldier shows us that poetic form is not neutral. Form can be an instrument of colonial violence, but it is also a tool for Indigenous preservation and sovereignty.
In We, a title that carries the weight of shared community and ancestral blood, Long Soldier does not simply document historical trauma. She writes towards restorative world-making. This collection stands as a visionary contribution to contemporary poetics, in which grief is collective, coerced erasure is dismantled spatially, and endurance is written in the stars.
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What Words Have Any _______: Layli Long Soldier’s We and The Poetics of Restorative Form
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Radu Daniel from Pexels
Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural community in an irradiated desert in the southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the US and recently received her MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and can be found in High Desert Journal, West Trade Review, The Maine Review and Rust + Moth. Work is forthcoming at The Columbia Review.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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