Deer Trails

2019 NCIBA Golden Poppy Award Winner - Poetry

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San Francisco’s 7th poet laureate—a Native American and native San Franciscan—explores urban space and the natural world.

Deer Trails is a strongly elegiac evocation of a San Francisco that lies buried under its contemporary urban landscape, but can still be found peeking through. Native American and native San Franciscan Kim Shuck is the city''s seventh poet laureate, and in these poems she celebrates the enduring presence of indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification, urbanization, and the erasure of memory.

Praise for Deer Trails and Kim Shuck

"Kim Shuck''s serpentine lyrics sing the streets, hills, trees, fog, and rain of San Francisco, as well as the city''s deeper cartography of watersheds, village sites, shellmounds, trade paths, and deer trails. As you navigate this book, listen closely: the poems transform into maps, prayers, and medicine that offer healing, wonderment, and joy in our difficult times. ''Travel grateful,'' the poet lovingly advises. ''Travel safe.''"––Craig Santos Perez

"Deer Trails is a work of maturity and passion from one of Native America''s best poets. Kim Shuck is a poet whose dedication to indigenous reality is unquestionable and admirable. The Tsalagi people live in a cherished memory of honor and peace. The poems in Deer Trails are a testament to these ends. I am proud to call her sister."––Lance Henson

"Made of leaps of beginning after beginning of images that sound as well as visually show nature''s humanity in a montage––naming en route to organic epiphanies––that''s the idiomatic brilliance of Kim Shuck''s actually quite sophisticated poems of simplicity."––Jack Hirschman

"Shuck''s poetry reminds us that you can believe in the blue note; our elders’ speeches that we dance near. Her poems seamlessly walk the aggregates of human presence and voice all of nature’s directions. Shuck reminds us of the omniscience of the people in this dictatorship of dimes; the omniscience of the people in all sketches about genocide. Hers is the only way to look at San Francisco. A prayer in the mind of a warrior."––Tongo Eisen-Martin