Songs

Songs is a collection of one Native American’s oral poetry captured on paper. A therapy client of the poet and psychologist Judson Crews, Charley John Greasybear told his poems to Crews, who wrote them down and assembled this collection. As J. Whitebird explains in the introduction, “Some of the poems speak clearly of his bonds to his native community, bonds which most of us will never have the good fortune to experience. Some of them cry of his violent and confused efforts to blend in with a homogenized America. But that is the point; Charley John sings openly of his view of wonderful and terrifying multiple worlds.