The second poetry collection by award-winning author Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw), Extant confronts the many ways in which Native Americans continue to be associated with the distant past and imagined, even today, as more animal than human. For more than a century, anthropologists, museum guides, and high school teachers have described Native American bodies, cultures, and languages as “endangered” or “almost extinct.” Through a combination of blackout poems, occasional poems, and free verse, Davis rewrites the narrative of what it means to exist, to live in a present shaped by colonial violence that emphasizes the power of survival. Drawing on online question forums, scientific studies, kitschy decor, and the day-to-day musings of an Indigiqueer Native woman, Extant stages encounters of Native survival within a world full of stars, cicadas, earthworms, and moss.
