Jennifer Foerster
Treasurer, Indigenous Nations Poets
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of three books of poetry, The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave 2022), Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press 2018) and Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press 2013), and served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (W.W. Norton 2020). She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, holds a PhD in Literary Arts from the University of Denver, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts. She teaches with the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Rainier Writing Workshop and works in non-profit administration for various arts and literary organizations. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco.
Publications
Bright Raft in the Afterweather
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: 2018
In her dazzling new book, Jennifer Elise Foerster announces a frightening new truth: “the continent is dismantling.” Bright Raft in the Afterweather travels the spheres of the past, present, future, and eternal time, exploring the fault lines that signal the break of humanity’s consciousness from the earth.
Featuring recurring characters, settings, and motifs from her previous book, Leaving Tulsa, Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds.
Foerster’s captivating language and evocative imagery immerse the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster’s refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance. In a world wrought with ecological imbalance and grief, Foerster shows how from the devastated land of our alienation there is potential to reconnect to our origins and redefine the terms by which we inhabit humanity and the earth.
