Little Big Bully

Penguin Poets

By: Heid E. Erdrich

Narrated by: Heid E. Erdrich

Length: 1 hr and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

In a new collection that is "a force of nature" (Amy Gerstler), renowned Native poet Heid E. Erdrich applies her rich, inventive voice and fierce wit to the deforming effects of harassment and oppression.

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we—how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women's resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. What is truth now? Who are we now? How do we find answers through the smoke of human destructiveness?

The past for Indigenous people, ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.

©2020 Heid E. Erdrich (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“The poems [in Little Big Bully] flow across a range of exigent challenges facing Native Americans, particularly women, and Erdrich takes full advantage of the wide format of this book. Many of the pieces are enriched by the author’s dramatic use of extra spaces and broken lines . . . [Erdrich has] remarkable power.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Erdrich writes across the breadth of the U.S.’s collective history with Indigenous peoples using historical terminology that reaches into the heart of tribal sovereign existence. Yet there is the underlying awareness that Indigenous nations maintain a unique history and have tribal narratives that shape their lives. Her poems are lyrical, visual and, at times, achingly personal.”—Jury Citation for the 2022 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

“A major collection by a writer who deserves an audience a big as the light she’s throwing off . . . Little Big Bully cycl[es] into private moments, public grief, purposefully erased history and Native politics. [Erdrich] finds ways to still chevron the mind sky with wonder . . . The improvisational torque of Little Big Bully means the book is always moving, into imagined story cycles, love poems, riffs, prose poems so vital it feels like they’ve burst free of punctuation, rather than eschewed it for style.”—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2020”