distant water : poems

Beth Piatote, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, is a Nez Perce scholar, playwright, poet, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include the scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature and The Beadworkers: Stories, which was long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her play, Antíkoni, had its world premiere with Native Voices in Los Angeles in November 2024. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including American Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, World Literature Today, and PMLA. Beth Piatote is devoted to the study of her heritage language of Nez Perce and is an Indigenous language revitalization activist. An exquisite debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit. Drawing its title from the Nez Perce word for ocean, distant water explores the mysterious process through which language is conveyed from one body to another, moving through waters, kin, memory, and breath. In this meditative, expansive collection, Beth Piatote reveals language as a shared vibration, a life force that sustains an intimate, animate world. Anchored in the Nez Perce homelands of the Northwest, the poems in distant water explore sonic and spiritual ecologies, recognizing land and language as living beings with whom we seek a common mode of expression. Here, poetic forms mimic the verb-centered structure of Nez Perce language, showing its capacity to express from a single shared root the movement of a sewing needle, the flow of a river, or the memory of a lost love. Language resonates with the land in poems that recall the drumbeat pulse of blood, an echo of grief, the sigh of a dying fire, an archive held in the mouth of a crow. Characters and motifs from traditional stories are recast, celebrating their timeless beauty, humor, and wisdom, and remedies imagined for historical wounds borne by the language itself. Inventive and resonant, precise and playful, distant water is an invitation to enter a vibrant thought world, to dwell in a grammar and sound born of and belonging to Nez Perce homelands and people, a language at once ancient and ever new.