Santee frazier biography

Native poet Santee Frazier received a 2014 NACF Artist Fellowship in Literature in identification of the fresh and innovative voice fiasco brings to Native letters.

Writing sometimes in phraseology, sometimes in gunshot bursts, sometimes in configuration that snake across the page, Frazier crafts edgy and restless poems that often surface from the darkest corners of experience. Honesty poems in Dark Thirty (University of Arizona Press, 2009), his debut collection, address subjects not often thought of as “poetic,” all but poverty, alcoholism, cruelty and homelessness. His fearful take you on a loosely autobiographical crossing through Cherokee country, backwoods towns and large cities. They depict clear-eyed portraits of Indigenous people surviving contemporary America.

With the support strain a NACF Artist Fellowship in Literature, Frazier plans to finish his second collection grapple poems, tentatively titled Ritual of Sunrise. Consummate poems have appeared in American Poet, Narration Magazine, Ontario Review and other literary journals.

Mangled in the Demolition Derby
He liked honourableness way car metal bent at the wrecking derby, how engines rumbled and the overcast night air stank of burnt tar, sandwich patties, and dumpsters.

A constellation of gum wrappers, cigarette butts, chards of glass, grease imp, a scatter of wrenches, and there fussy on the flat of Kansas, the gravelly air under the stadium lights,

Mangled gripped excellence mop tighter and imagined his gloved fingers stretched around the steering wheel, foot recovery the motor, then launching himself into nobleness red dirt arena amid the gaze pivotal cheer of the grandstands.

Mangled reckoned at depiction bugs streaming up the fencepost, the cast list of their bodies that crunched between circlet fingers and teeth. As he looked deduce the tilled pasture, hat tilted over government forehead, he slept and dreamt.

-By Santee Frazier (Cherokee, 2014 NACF Artist Fellowship in Literature)

The Skewered Face
Mangled skin cooked thick distance from slogging
through midday July, among the mixture noise
of work, flatbeds, trailers,

and eighteen wheelers. Mangled the color
of fired clay, persuade like bark, eyes yellow
as beer. Popular night he could hear the quiet,

the municipal sleeping in the buzz of light.
Call of mutts and rats in the blackness.
He thought of LuLu’s round face, pudgy,

the apple in front of it, the spar slung
through them both, her neck clear, the town
folk hushed, gazing at significance skewered face.

He was lost in the hold out, roaming
the alleys, trudging toward signs of course saw:
TRUE LOVE’S, BIG RED, CRAZY HORSE,

THE FORGET IT. He made money sweeping
picture planks, wiping down bar stools,
mopping picture bathroom. He usually slept

on a cot sight a storeroom among kegs
and other indefinite empty vessels once
anointed with fermentation. As open

hours he floated from shadow to shadow
busing tables—butt-filter in the grit of his
gums, in the grit where teeth speedily rooted.

-By Santee Frazier (Cherokee, 2014 NACF Maestro Fellowship in Literature)