Renowned poet and artist Layli Long Soldier follows up her award-winning collection, Whereas, with a complex new collection that challenges the conventions of genre. We continues Long Soldier’s confrontation with the limits of writing in English as a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, inverting expectations and disrupting traditional uses of English to highlight the discomfort of critiquing the legacy of colonization in the language of the colonizer. With We, Long Soldier vacillates between prose, multimedia, and textuality as she wages what she describes as “a war of language.” The result is a brilliantly nuanced record of injustice, survival, and a history that will not be ignored.
At the outset of the collection, Long Soldier invites readers to “interact with the title of [We],” which she explains to mean “keep the title as is…in the English language” or “change the title to Wé, meaning ‘blood’ in the Lakota language.” This inscription further explains that, for Long Soldier, both spellings engage ideas central to the collection, including community, collectivity, legacy, lineage, and kinship. This carries into the first poem, “Tumbleweeds,” where the speaker interrogates the meaning and place of the I in language, as well as in artistic expression. The lines are presented alongside a montage of photographs showing daily life, with a micro essay addressed to the speaker’s child at the center of the piece. The essay, like the stanzas that bookend it, offers a tense exchange in which both the speaker and her child consider the importance of visibility, of honoring difference. Through this opening sequence, Long Soldier successfully foreshadows numerous tensions that appear in the collection, as well as the growing insistence of young people that they be heard in advocating for themselves, for their people.
“Now, You Will Listen: Trust Issues with American Schools and the Care of Our Native Children,” the third piece in the collection, is a sweeping refusal of genre that bridges prose essay, photographs, and conventional poetry to critique the long history of violence and erasure predicated on indigenous communities by the United States, specifically against young people in state-run school settings. The piece moves between a present-day experience wherein the speaker’s child is punished after challenging a midterm assignment requiring students “to watch a YouTube video about ‘bizarre’ foods of a certain Asian country” and the aftermath, including the speaker’s request to visit the class and describe the boarding schools that many indigenous children were forced to attend as part of various treaties.
The speaker explains that more than 2,000 unmarked graves have been located across just 11 of the 139 boarding schools tasked with educating indigenous children. Throughout the prose sections of the piece, Long Soldier uses punctuation (eg. “hands)))” and “continue))))))))))”), font size, and text formatting to resist the very conventions imposed by public education systems, mirroring the resistance from young people and adults in the community. The piece closes with photographs and lines describing a personal project that the speaker, her child, and community members undertake to honor some of those children whose lives were cut short in boarding schools.
“Obligations” may offer the most conventional approach to poetry for those familiar with Long Soldier’s previous work, yet even here Long Soldier resists traditional form and linear readings. The poem is separated into numbered sections, each centered on the page and arranged into a diamond shape. Though the pieces include line breaks and conventional text formatting, Long Soldier continues her rebuke of convention through a combination of extended white space and a loose form situated somewhere between the contrapuntal and concrete poetry. The following poem, “184 Xs,” continues this experimentation of form and textuality, trading on the “X” used by Lakota elders to sign their acknowledgement of the Treaty of Fort Laramie while commenting on literacy, anonymity, and the enduring complications of ambiguity in legalese. “Constellations” immediately follows with a series of circular images accompanied by the true names of each of those who signed “X” to the treaty.
While We deviates from conventional poetry, Long Soldier situates her collection along other hybrid collections, such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, putting her work in direct conversation with other living writers challenging formal structures as they critique systemic oppression, historical injustice, and ongoing erasure of voices outside the hegemony. This is a collection that fits well in Long Soldier’s body of work, but also one that feels immediate and responsive to the current moment in the United States. Enjoyable on first read, it grows richer with each subsequent pass.
POETRY
We
By Layli Long Soldier
Graywolf Press
Published October 6, 2026
