A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings (The Iroquois and Their Neighbors)

Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, the poems
in this stunning collection alternate between contraction
and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically,
historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee tribe,
Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized
culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger
dominant culture.
With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty,
Gansworth's poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective
loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry,
creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in
the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of
Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to
Gansworth's remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of
upstate New York's Indian communities.