The poetry in Effigies and Wind do more to honor and explain Place and Nature than the entries in Reed's anthology. The section in Totems, as a whole, lacks the depth of what Rexford, McDougall, and Melendez bring to such a heading. These poets speak of place and nature with intimacy, but also with stoic detachment, a strength in lessons from a dying mother.

Such depth and wisdom of sound is not possible for a thing called Chicago, who has blood but no history of peace. It is younger than corporeal knowledge, unaware of place before time and its cyclical birth. How could the ancestry of place and nature be left out of its section in a book whose title begins, "From Totems"? Am I to assume Reed purposefully excluded such artists in favor of a "Sun with Issues" (a student's poem, I would bet)? While this doesn't seem likely, I question, now, Reed's motives of gathering as I do those of the white male-dominated canon.

The fallacy lies in exclusion, as though "printed" equates with "worthy." Perhaps Reed did not know of these poets in order that he include them, but isn't that his mission? There is certainly a difference between not knowing or seeking, and annihilating and imposing will; however, is the result painfully similar? How much more pressure must there be on one who takes up the mantel of the underdog, the arms against the establishment? For that freedom fighter, the failure of exclusion seems a sadder betrayal.

Even in Wind, there is an editor's homage to the "proper," to the English establishment. The Spanish words of these Latino poets are set in italics. Set apart, as though not yet belonging and having to slide in sideways. How strange they look next to the Spanish words that have been co-opted, those like "papaya" allowed to stand up straight because English has marked them for entry. Time and proximity, and trade (always trade), have discerned the foreign thing's reference; it has shed the immigrant's shoulder slump and bowed head. I admire the use of the language, but I wish they had let the words stand, beside their "English" counterparts, as equals.

Spain, when its name was Iberia, was not forced by Greek or Arab invaders to give up its language. A favor the crown did not repay when it played the role of invader; it chose the role of subjugator. And England too, both erased cultures as if it were their job. They imposed the will of gunpowder on those of different color and spiritual understanding. Entire languages lost, whole peoples starved to evaporation. The languages linked the people to the land, and when the languages vanished, our understanding of the connection among living beings (what actually is "living," even) was also lost and Earth began to show her wounds.

In "Ka 'Olelo," the poet explains how her land and its people were stripped of their language. Until this poem, I had been marveling at the fluidity of the lines in English, the grasp of language that the craft revealed, a language I assumed was not her first. What skill! I exclaimed. And while the work is still skillful, there is sorrow in that beauty. The lines long and flowing like the hair, the wind, the sea, of a people whose language was beaten from their children. Here the Hawaiian words are given font equality, and at this poem we realize she has been painstakingly reclaiming each one.

"On Finding my Father's First Essay" brought me to tears, and as I wiped them away to read the final stanza, I realized the cost of the canon, the blood debt, unpaid, for the crown of the language we call proper, a shackled propriety. An IOU so large and bored with promise, it yawns like the sea of Nalani's poetry.

I wonder what language I would be speaking, had Spain allowed the indigenous tribes of Cuba to keep their tongues, had my father kept at least the Spanish in my ear once the Southern preschool won my language need. I think of him, and how he shook to shed the stigma that he landed in. How he taught himself English to never again be tricked and left on a bench at school, a shamed and dirty spic. After being forced to the giant island, put on the last plane by his mother, her hands already bending to arthritis (I imagine her cupped wave), he stepped onto U.S. soil with only the clothes on his back and vowed in that moment to never want for material. I cannot blame him, but I wonder the cost of assimilation, these words I cannot speak to my grandmother. I wonder the words she cannot speak to hers.