“How many lives / can I hold in each chamber / of my heart?” Kinsale Drake asks with a singular tenderness and open heartedness in her debut collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket. What is the anatomy of care, and how can we realize our own capaciousness? How do we make kin in and through poetry and song? How can we best sing ourselves forth even as we sing beloveds back? What is most keenly heard in Drake’s first collection is the voice of “a woman remembering her place / among the stars,” a voice that emerges and reemerges through generational love. Singing across borders that wish to silence and enclose her, Drake “shatters the black into brilliance” and reminds us that a story worth telling, worth singing, is no more or less than the perpetual gathering of a body arcing across the earth each day, ultimately harmonizing the music of the land with the flowering of the cosmic and celestial in the body, making a home for her beloveds there.

Drake’s poems enact the hope and promise of reciprocity—that through selfless expression, as the mystics define art-making, we might better learn how to listen, to “stitch the world / together.” This listening takes many shapes and forms in the poems that constellate The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, including bearing witness to atrocity—imperial acts of genocide, displacement, and erasure of Indigenous peoples, their art, and their environment. Drake’s poems experience and survive that systematic rupture with a voice that holds many voices “rivering        the smoke.” Drake resists the tomb of recorded history and the archive (a place where poetry often finds itself “living,” against its own nature—within the Gramophone of America, or of American institutional knowledge) by practicing and revering “winged music,” an oral history which relies and insists upon the survival of community and reciprocity, on kinship and love that cannot be controlled, within a colonial project which seeks to “swallow” or disappear those principles of care.

This survival, or survivance, as scholar Gerald Vizenor names “active presence,” becomes a practice or allegiance, one which is reflected in Drake’s craft—lines that lose and gather, stagger and leap, dip and swoon, gasp and flow, but never relinquish their footing. “I think I remember stories because they are violent. / Or because there is music.” Music, here, constitutes both the transience and lastingness of voice, and the soul within that voice—the grief and joy intrinsic to remembrance, and the music we make just by speaking out, which is a kind of singing, of breath. “My body dreams less tragic NDN things. / She stitches compositions, / When she can. / But at the very least, / My body dreams.” In poems that conjure and reconstitute voice, Drake helps us sing again, making a distinction between instruments that destroy and instruments that give and create music.

In these poems, dreams are a music of the subconscious, a mode of desire. The body is an instrument that dreams. In dream, desire for the self becomes a wish for a community of selves, a beckoning toward some other state of knowing, as in the poem “Your Return”: “Last night we fought / again in my dreams. / It’s funny how / when we do this, / our small step-dance, / you only speak / in Navajo and I / understand…” Relationships of love, and longing for intimacy between beloveds, transcend semantic meaning and reach across distances for a different kind of understanding. A listening of the soul, the heart:

“But in

my dreams, we

cry at the table

afterwards,

and it is almost

like surfacing

together

I wake up

gasping

thinking

the sound

of the kitchen

door opening

is you,

running

from the table

to the dog

closing its heavy jaws

on the rooster,

yelling

hago, shhh!

come here,

come here.”

To conjure, to “tend this land / & remember” are radical acts of love and joy. Perhaps the answer to Drake’s question about the capacity of her heart is as limitless as the community she loves, and her heart is as full as the world which surrounds and embraces it. Maybe it is “the beetleskin of grief,” in actuality, which remains the same size, as the world one builds around and within that grief grows larger, light bursting in and through the cracks and chinks of that armor. “Joy will come, / like the frogs, / more often,” Drake writes with certainty, and I believe her, wholeheartedly.

At a panel discussion in Los Angeles, Drake told the story of taking twelve hour drives with her mother between their two homes—L.A. and Southern Utah—belting their favorite songs across deserts as they spanned that distance. There are moments in life, in poetry, when the ecstatic sincerity of someone’s voice opening into love helps you experience and locate your own, helps you name the traveling force of language as a kind of propulsive return, and the generosity of story takes you along for that journey. Listening to her speak, I couldn’t help but remember my own long drives to visit family after the car accident that took the lives of my mother and brother, the songs my Dad and I sang to one another, one’s voice keeping the other’s awake as we watched the dawn color the sky, the mountains of my childhood, with light.

Some people have the ability to enact this lightening on our minds, our hearts, to remind us that we are living parallel to a kind of love that might save us. Kinsale is one of those people. Maybe this review isn’t about a book, so much as about the person who made it, and the effect she has on the world around her. Maybe that’s the direction of contemporary poetry I believe in most—not an art that proves its dying with effort to those critics who might praise its doing so, that pretends objectivity for the work itself in order to argue for its lastingness, but a cosmic, egoless force that refuses that dying, that lives and loves and holds and praises and sings and gathers, and in doing so keeps others alive. An art form that enacts timelessness the way holding hands with someone you love across a console can make those same hands into a nest, can remind one that you and them exist together in an eternal present, that you are with, that you are alive, that you can and will sing your way joyfully home.

Through her community outreach—initiatives like Changing Womxn Collective and NDN Girls Book Club, the latter of which has distributed over 20,000 free books to Native youth across the country—her deep love for her family, her friends, her kin, and in the making and gifting of her distinctive yet capacious voice, Kinsale Drake reminds me how poetry can be a radical act of care and reciprocity that transcends time and space. “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world,” botanist and teacher Robin Wall Kimmerer writes. Here is a love fueled by fury and devotion, by the instinctive transference and passing forth of a learned generosity and selflessness, maybe, but mostly by a fierce and intentional showering of care that emanates from Kinsale with an aura that has the force, inevitability, and gentle wakefulness of a brightening day.

If the sky was once a dark blanket, as Drake’s title reminds us, then look here, at this book, this heart “UNRAVEL[ing], like the sun, which spills itself along,” this map, or guidebook, or lead sheet telling us where we might look in ourselves for the music that brightens the sky now, so that we might greet the sun, so that we might be “Stupid / as…songbird[s], but singing nonetheless.”

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