The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket  

By Kinsale Drake, Selected by Jacqueline Allen Trimble 

The National Poetry Series 

The University of Georgia Press, 2024 

Paper: $19.95 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Kwoya Fagin Maples 

With her remarkable debut, Kinsale Drake’s collection, selected by Jacqueline Allen Trimble, offers intimate poems rich in voice and emotional resonance. Drake’s poems are aesthetically and musically pleasing, in turns somber, playful, reverent, and bold. The beauty and complex nature of Drake’s work reflects her cultural identity as a citizen of the Navajo Nation (within the context of contemporary American society). Her poems portray grief and cultural erasure, but they are also curious. They evoke wonder. Ultimately, Drake celebrates both her heritage and her people. The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket also sheds light on the vast disconnection between Native versus American land and the washing of “what has been stolen.” Drake employs music, dance, water, and family to convey themes including cultural erasure, colonization, womanhood, motherhood, and family. Her poems are rich in story, imagery, and the truth of our country.  

In the first section, Drake includes a tryptic dedicated to Mildred Bailey, a native blues singer. This poem acknowledges the ancestral experience that is inextricable from the present-day speaker. In the poem “August,” the speaker’s feet become “instruments” of dancing, but as the poem continues, her feet become the feet of her mother, “who used to sneak out to border towns and line dance with cowboys.” With this poem, the speaker introduces cultural memory and the concept of navigating competing worlds. For Drake, “all contradictions find a home in the body.” This line encapsulates the nuances of Drake’s unique collection. 

Water is present in nearly every poem in Section II, whether it be the speaker’s pregnant mother’s water breaking, the sea, radio waves, a wading pool, a flood, a dam being broken and destroying Indigenous land at the hands of the government, or even tears. Here, water is a device of change: in a coming of age, in the washing away of Indigenous history and culture, and in the intensity and fluidity of motherhood.   

Throughout Section III, with poems like “Kylie Jenner Collage of the American West” and “In the National Museum of the American Indian,” Drake highlights the egregious contemporary “transformation” of native land under American influence. The speaker sits in a Taco Bell and thinks of her family. She acknowledges the “burial ground” that our cities are built upon.  Drake’s poems memorialize loss, effortlessly portraying a confounding grief, both old and new.  

In her final section, Drake explores the challenge of living in the contemporary world while also attempting to stay closely connected to a culture that continues to be silenced, specifically by the current interpretation of Native history in America. Her day-to-day life in her community is complicated by how she is perceived as both Native and American: by others and herself. The final poem of the collection, “Blacklist Me,” is a powerfully voiced poem that affirms the speaker’s people who will [never be] on the radio but will “dust themselves off and laugh at the smolder.” This book is a necessary debut and a startling contribution to poetry.  

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a poet, woodworker, and teacher of creative writing. A Charleston, S.C. native, her creative practice spans both literary and visual arts. She is the author of Long Eye, forthcoming from Hub City Press, Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), and co-editor of I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.