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Navajo zinester releases her first poetry book, exploring the significance of blue corn

Amber McCrary is the author of "Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert."
Nate Lemuel, University of Arizona Press
Amber McCrary is the author of "Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert."

Blue corn is an important food to the Navajo people. They eat it shelled, roasted, dried and ground, in sweet or savory blue corn mush, or flour. It’s a part of their creation stories, it’s used in ceremonies and songs.

It’s the title of a new book of poems by Amber McCrary, a Dine poet and zinester. "Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert" explores the significance of not just blue corn, but juniper, saguaros and more in her first book of poetry.

It’s a book of poems, but it also tells a love story. Her love story. McCrary joined The Show to talk about it.

Conversation highlights

AMBER MCCRARY: I would say this book is my desert love poem book. It's a love story between the writer and the muse. And the writer is coming from a point of view from a Dine perspective and a blue corn perspective or a juniper tree perspective or a Colorado plateau perspective. And from these perspectives, they're looking at their muse, who is a saguaro or the Sonoran Desert or white corn. So just different elements of people, place and plants.

Right, because you're telling this story of this Dine woman who falls in love with a man from the from the Oʼodham reservation, from southern Arizona, from a very different part of this state.

MCCRARY: Yes, from the Oʼodham reservation.

Talk more about that kind of parallel that you make throughout this. The book takes place in parts and in different sections, and some of them have to do with the of northern Arizona juniper, where the Navajo Nation largely sits. But a lot of this is about the Sonoran Desert, which you were not super familiar with, it sounds like.

MCCRARY: Yeah, I was not familiar. I came to Phoenix, you know, through college and going to ASU. But I'm originally from northern Arizona, so the deserts are completely different from, you know, northern Arizona and southern Arizona, so it took a while for me to get acclimated to heat — and to nothing but heat and sun. And yeah, it kind of, it talks about that, too.

So you have this blue corn symbology and ideology here, but then you also have a lot of significance of the saguaro, which represents the Sonoran Desert — it's the only place the saguaro cactus grows. Talk a little bit about using that image here as well and what that meant.

MCCRARY: So I use the saguaro image in a lot of ways where it's, it's my muse. And I also have poems of like a self portrait as a saguaro and what it must be like being a saguaro in the desert, especially when there's climate change happening or there's urbanization happening. And I also try to look at it in a perspective of my muse being a saguaro. And like his connection to saguaros as an Oʼodham them person and the significance that saguaros play within his culture. And like how they see saguaros as relatives and kind of similar to, you know, how Navajos — we see like junipers as relatives or different plants up north as relatives. It's kind of similar down here in the south.

The poems in this book are disparate — they tell a story, but some are really devastating about pain, about trauma, about alcohol, about land grabs. But then there's so many that are just about love, about joy. There's a sense of humor in this as well. How did you balance that?

MCCRARY: That is something I feel like I always have in the back of my mind as a writer. It's really hard when it comes to trauma and just the whole idea of, like, you know, trauma dumping or — I wanted it to be in my book because it's part of my life. But I didn't want it to be my whole story, because I feel like my whole story isn't just doom and gloom. I mean, like if I focused on that, it would be. But I also wanted to focus on what was happening in my life at the time, you know, I was falling in love. Humor has something that's always been in my life, and that's one of the biggest things that keeps me going. And that's something I wish I wrote more of in my book was humor, but you know, there's always future books, there's always books.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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