Reviews and Praise for Bury Me in Thunder
“syan jay’s debut poetry collection, Bury Me in Thunder, is one I’ve been anticipating for a while now. These poems weave Indigenous folklore into their history making, on both an intimate familial level, and in building a larger portrait of the post-colonial American landscape. Their poem from the collection, “Creation Myth Along the Black River,” re-imagines the speaker’s birth occurring on “a riverbank of irises,” “in a cradle of tender purple that bloomed and bloomed,” instead of a birth into a shattered family mythos. These poems dare to resist in their re-imaginings, to gift us a new tenderness, despite.”
– George Abraham for Lit Hub’s “12 Books You Should Read in January”
“There will be a future, Bury Me in Thunder asserts, even if we won’t all get there. But those of us who make it will do so because we’ve learned to excavate our ancestors’ messages and reconnect with the land around us. In this debut syan jay demonstrates their ability to wield strong metaphoric imagery that contains both beauty and violence, and their commitment to a poetic politics of care.”
- Irène Mathieu for Muzzle Magazine
Featured on Ms. Magazine’s Feminist-Know-It-All Reads for the Rest of Us 2020 Preview!