I always look forward to fiction written by poets because their relationship with language tends to be more musical than that of writers who have reared themselves predominantly on prose. On that score, the debut short story collection Red Ants by Kimberly Blaeser—author of six books of poetry, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets—does not disappoint. Those coordinating the 2026 National Book Award seem to agree, as this title was recently longlisted for that honor.
The highly varied sentence structure and length, as well as a tireless attention to rhythm, lets readers see the poet at work and makes Red Ants a very lively read. The collection brims with athletic language—and I don’t mean acrobatic, because Blaeser’s sentences aren’t just for show. They pull us into the worlds and psyches they depict. Prose studded with phrases like “I fell into the forever of the river world” and “fires followed floods on our tongues” provides much reading pleasure, especially for those who have considered that English prose has as much natural rhythm as its poetry does.
This approach to language is used in multiple ways throughout the collection. Some of Blaeser’s shortest pieces, like “Launch Pad” or “Waiting,” read like flash fiction or prose poems, in which language feels primarily evocative. It doesn’t necessarily move the story forward in traditional ways, but it sinks us into a mood the way music does. In first person stories (the collection leans heavily toward that mode) such language elucidates the mindsets of Blaeser’s narrators. The language they use shows us how they metaphorize their world, which in turn gives us insight into the shape of their minds. Likewise we see a level of metaphorization from the author herself, whose own mind and perspective come into view for us through the patterns that span across stories. Images woven from poetically-informed language elucidate themes within individual pieces—such as the title story, in which scientific facts about red ants provide thematic unity—and across the collection as a whole.
At their best, these stories find a balance within Blaeser’s multifaceted approach to language. “A Tally in Birch” and “Leaving Paradise,” two of the strongest stories in the collection, blend poetic rhythms, revelation of their narrators’ minds, and clear connections to authorial themes that ripple through the collection.
But Red Ants is not just about language, and Blaeser’s themes pull their weight. The most salient theme is indigenous life in America, particularly among the Anishinaabe community in Blaeser’s native northern Minnesota, where she is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. The stories are typically set in reservation environments, and she depicts life there matter-of-factly and without glamorizing it. Reservation life, as Blaeser depicts it in this book, involves a lot of keeping your head down and staying out of trouble, which is a clear concern of many of her characters. It’s not only white people you have to look out for, but also tribal leadership who make backdoor deals and punish those who oppose them. The American Indian Movement, founded in Minnesota in 1968 and historically speaking the most recognizable Indigenous activist group in the country, arouses instant suspicion.
In this sense, Blaeser’s Anishinaabe characters fight battles on two fronts simultaneously. Outside their communities, they have to deal with white avarice, attacks on their environment, stigmatization, and lack of acceptance. While some characters leave the reservation for college or work, most seem to boomerang back. But they also have uneasy relationships within their communities too, even among people they obviously love. The specter of bloodlines—the question of How Indian are you, really?—can hang over the strongest friendships.
There’s a sense that people in this community are stuck in the middle between a white world that doesn’t really want them and an indigenous world that—given external pressures and internal struggles—isn’t always sure where it’s going. They do what’s necessary to keep their community together and maintain their relationship with nature and their traditions, but it’s hard to find characters in this collection who feel sure about what they’re doing. There’s a sense that people keep burning offerings of tobacco and honoring dead kin and maintaining their language even though there seems to be no end in sight to the cycles of life that breed, throughout the community, a kind of existential exhaustion.
In such circumstances it is difficult to find the fire necessary to fight back, but that spirit does show itself in Red Ants. Though Blaeser doesn’t dwell on them, there are characters on the fringes of the community who get involved in activities that some call terrorism—the strongest example being “Copper Traces,” in which a woman tries to keep hope for her missing brother. Pipelines are mentioned with regularity, which makes sense because of protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and similar projects in recent years. Blaeser does particularly well in showing us the all-pervasive, day-to-day effects of living circumstances that make people want to fight back. “This is no longer an idyll, Norman Rockwell’s Native America,” says one of her narrators, “it is Vine Deloria’s.” This is a reference to the Lakota philosopher and social critic whose books, such as Custer Died for Your Sins (1968) and We Talk, You Listen (1970), have shaped generations of thinking about Native nation politics.
Blaeser focuses her attention throughout Red Ants on the roles of women in this society, and she depicts with great complexity the way they engage in the two-sided struggles of their lives. Many of the grown-ups are educated and single, navigating the lives of men who get into various kinds of trouble and tend to drag others into it with them. For these women, keeping themselves together is a necessity and self-fulfillment is a luxury. “I’m just trying to fit in somewhere,” one narrator tells us, and this statement encapsulates the lives of many women in the book. What makes this collection strong is the range of female eyes through which Blaeser looks at the world, each one with her own take on life. The narrators vary in age, too, and some of the best stories feature girls just deep enough into adolescence—like Bean from “Leaving Paradise”—to glimpse what womanhood has in store for them.
In her stories, Blaeser makes liberal use of Anishinaabe cosmology—one of them centers on Mishibizhii, a panther with a spiked back and reptile skin. Some readers might be tempted to call this magical realism, but it is important to remember that Indigenous storytelling traditions have been interweaving cosmology with everyday life since long before magical realism (or even realism itself) had a name. Blaeser sometimes turns cosmology on its head, as in “Sky Stories,” where a trickster named Nanabozho comes to life while some Anishinaabe try to shake off a pesky white cop. Cosmology is woven into life in this collection the same way as poetic language is woven into Blaeser’s prose.
If there was one aspect to this collection I would have liked to see straightened, it would be to see some of Blaeser’s narrators reach out a bit more toward the audience. They can be quite coy, as if we’re catching them talking to themselves, and this can lead to gaps in our moment-to-moment understanding of the story’s events. This elision of information—or use of narrative white space, to put it another way—is certainly within the range of fiction technique, and Blaeser often carries it off well, especially in her immersive and atmospheric stories. But when there is a larger narrative to propel forward, narrators who don’t seem very concerned with being understood can leave readers wondering what is happening.
But this doesn’t take away from the strength of Red Ants. Through Blaeser’s well-distributed perspectives within the Anishinaabe community, it offers many perspectives to examine its collective life. By asking us to look through multiple sets of eyes, it allows readers to combine its elements into many different coherent pictures. If it moves on to the next round of the National Book Awards, it will be a worthy selection.
FICTION
Red Ants
By Kimberly Blaeser
Counterpoint
Published October 6, 2026
