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• Refugee Red Hen Press (Pasadena, CA), 2022

• Pamela Uschuk website - http://www.pamelauschuk.com

  About Pamela Uschuk
  (Describe when you were founded, the most important thing your company does, what you care most about, and what sets you apart from similar businesses.)

  Pamela Uschuk is family-owned and operated right here in Bayfield, CO. Other companies may offer similar services, but our services are the best, and come with a personal touch.

• Cutthroat - http://www.cutthroatmag.com/uschuk.html

  Pam teaches writing workshops for the University of Arizona's Poetry Center. Besides hiking, kayaking, making jewelry, snorkeling and traveling, she is happiest when writing. She lives in the Rocky Mountains outside of Durango and in Tucson, Arizona with the writer William Pitt Root, their wolfdog, Mojo Buffalo Buddy, Zazu and the queen of cats, Sadie.

  cutthroatmag@gmail.com and on Face Book

  Editor in Chief

  Pam's buddy, Zazu
  Pam's books & cd may be purchased through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, Wings Press (www.wingspress.com), in selected independent bookstores in the U.S. and are available on Ebooks, Ibooks, IPad and others.ext.

  CRAZY LOVE, WINNER OF A 2010 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD Ci"life lived at the fever pitch of awareness..."ck
  Naomi Shihab Nyeto dd text.

  WILD IN THE PLAZA OF MEMORY
  "Uschuk's best collection thus far." Joy Harjo
  "a powerful and essential author, one of the few able to confront the uninterrupted crisis of our era with tragic joy and an unshaken faith in the instrumental efficacy of art."Alfred Corn
  PAMELA USCHUK

  Booklist Notable Book: January 2015
  Uschuk’s new collection of meditative, delectably powerful poems offers a steady and generous solace that serves as a platform for thought-provoking glimpses into spirit, family, and feeling. She has written of a tethered reality, commonplace secrets, and emotional rescue. And she is political. In the same vein as her contemporaries Patricia Smith and
  Joy Harjo, Uschuk is strong in metaphor, urgent in language, and powerful in vivisection.
  — Mark Eleveld

  American Book Award winner, Pamela Uschuk graduated with a MFA in Poetry and Fiction from University of Montana. Called by THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW, “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” she is the author of seven books of poems, among them the award-winning FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT (also a CD of the same title with musical accompaniment by Chameleon and Joy Harjo), CRAZY LOVE (2010 American Book Award), and WILD IN THE PLAZA OF MEMORY, 2012, published by Wings Press, San Antonio, and WITHOUT THE COMFORT OF STARS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Sampark Press, New Delhi. Several chapbooks of her poems have appeared, including WITHOUT BIRDS, WITHOUT FLOWERS, WITHOUT TREES (Flume Press Chapbook Award, 1990), BLOOD FLOWER, www.thedrunkenboat.com/uschuk.html and HEARTBEATS IN STONES (2005, Codhill Press, New York). PAM USCHUK'S GREATEST HITS (Pudding House Press) appeared in 2009. An independent film, "Healing in the Language of Trees," based on her poem of that title was released by Wing & A Prayer Productions. Translated into over a dozen languages, Uschuk’s work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Ploughshares, and Hunger Mountain. Among her literary prizes are the War Poetry Prize,New Millenium Poetry Prize, Struga International Poetry Prize for a theme poem, the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Ascent, and Amnesty International. Her nonfiction and short stories have appeared in Parabola, Terrain, Writers Forum: Best of the West, Still Going Strong, and Inside/Outside. Pam has been featured writer at The Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Tel Aviv, Israel, The American Center in New Delhi, India,University of Pisa, at International Poetry Festivals in Malmo and University of Lund, Sweden and Struga, Macedonia, at the British School in Pisa, Italy, Split This Rock, Gemini Ink Writers Festival, Meacham Writers Conference, Southern Book Fair, Scandinavian Book Fair, Deep South Writers Conference, and numerous universities and book stores. She is regularly a featured poet at the Prague Summer Programs. Besides being an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Uschuk spent years teaching poetry-in-schools to Indigenous students on the Salish, Sioux, Assiniboine, Northern Cheyenne, Flathead, Blackfeet, Crow, Tohono O’odham and Yaqui Nations in Montana and Arizona. Pam was the John C. Hodges Visiting Poet at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a Black Earth Institute Fellow for 2018-2021.

• Poetry Center, University of Arizona website - https://poetry.arizona.edu/people/pamela-uschuk

  Pamela Uschuk

  Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pamela Uschuk has howled out seven books of poems, including her most recent, Blood Flower, one of Book List’s Notable Books in 2015. Her collection, Refugee, is forthcoming in May from Red Hen Press. Red Hen Press will also reprint three of her collections in 2022: Crazy Love (American Book Award), Wild In the Plaza of Memory and Blood Flower.

  Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc.

  Among her awards are the 2022 Storyknife Women Writers Residency in Homer, Alaska, Black Earth Institute Fellowship 2018-2021, War Poetry Prize from winningwriters.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL.

  Editor-In-Chief of CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona. She edited the anthology, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017 as well as Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Winter 2020. Pam is a Fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Her work was featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, chosen by U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She is finishing a mixed-genre memoir Hope’s Crazed Angels: An Odyssey Through Cancer.

• Wikipedia -

  Pamela Uschuk
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Pamela Uschuk
  Pam Uschuk in her homeland
  Pam Uschuk in her homeland
  Nationality American
  Alma mater Central Michigan University;
  University of Montana
  Genre Poetry
  Notable awards American Book Award, Dorothy Daniels Writing Award, National League of PEN Women, Ascent Poetry Prize, Best of the Web
  Spouse William Pitt Root
  Pamela Uschuk is an American poet, and 2011 Visiting Poet at University of Tennessee. She won a 2010 American Book Award, for Crazy Love: New Poems.

  Contents
  1 Life
  2 Works
  2.1 Edited
  3 References
  4 External links
  Life
  Born in 1953 and raised on a farm in Michigan, she received her B.A. In English (cum laude) from Central Michigan University.[1] She graduated from the University of Montana with a MFA in Poetry and Fiction.[2]

  Uschuk has taught creative writing at Marist College, Pacific Lutheran University, Fort Lewis College, the University of Arizona, Salem College, where she was also Director of the Center for Women Writers, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, where she was Associate Professor of Creative Writing.

  She has also taught at Greenhaven Maximum Security Prison for Men in upstate New York and in Indigenous schools on the Salish, Sioux, Assiniboine, Northern Cheyenne, Flathead, Blackfeet, Crow, Tohono O'odham and Yaqui nations.

  Uschuk leads poetry workshops across the country. She is on the faculty at Ghost Ranch Jan Term, where she teaches a three-week mixed-genre writing intensive. She teaches creative writing classes at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center.

  Her literary prizes include The American Book Award (Crazy Love, Wings Press, 2010), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the American League of PEN Women, Simi Valley, the King's English Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Poetry Prize, the Iris Poetry Prize, The Ronald H. Bayes Poetry Prize, and the Tucson/Pima Literature Prize (FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT), winningwriters War Poetry Prize and Struga Poetry Prize for a theme poem. She has also won awards and honors from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Wildwood Journal, and Amnesty International.

  Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and it appears over 300 journals and anthologies worldwide, including Agni, American Voice, Asheville Poetry Review, Nimrod, Parabola, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Southeast Review.[3]

  Uschuk was the judge for the 2012 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize.[4]

  She married poet William Pitt Root; they live in Tucson, Arizona. During the summer, they hike and kayak near Durango, Colorado.[5]

  Works
  Refugee. Red Hen Press. 2022. ISBN 978-1-63628-019-6.
  Blood Flower, Wings Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-60940-411-6
  "Wild In The Plaza of Memory," Wings Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-916727-92-5
  Crazy Love: New Poems, Wings Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-916727-58-1
  Heartbeats in Stones Codhill Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1-930337-17-6
  Scattered Risks Wings Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-916727-12-3
  One-Legged Dancer Wings Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-930324-76-6
  Finding Peaches in the Desert Wings Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-930324-59-9
  John Bradley, ed. (1995). "Of Simple Intent". Atomic ghost: poets respond to the nuclear age. Coffee House Press. p. 300. ISBN 978-1-56689-027-4. Pamela Uschuk.
  Without Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees, Flume Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-9613984-7-7
  Light From Dead Stars. Full Count. 1981.
  In Anthology

  Melissa Tuckey, ed. (2018). Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820353159.
  Continental Drift, editor, Drucilla Wall, publisher University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
  Edited
  Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, 2008, Volume 4, Issue 1, ISBN 978-0-9795634-1-6 "Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts," 2011, Volume 12, Issue 1, ISBN 978-0-9795634-5-4 THE BEST OF CUTTHROAT, VOLUME 20, Issue 1 TRUTH TO POWER: WRITERS RESPOND TO THE RHETORIC OF HATE AND FEAR, 2017

• From Publisher -

  Pamela Uschuk
  Human rights activist Pamela Uschuk’s seven poetry collections include Crazy Love (American Book Award) and Blood Flower. Translated into twelve languages, her work appears widely in Poetry, Ploughshares, and others. Awards include Best of the Web, Dorothy Daniels Award (National League of American PEN Women), prizes from Ascent, New Millenium & Amnesty International. Editor of Cutthroat, Truth to Power, and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Black Earth Institute Fellow, Uschuk lives in Tucson. She leads writing workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She’s finishing her memoir, Of Thunderlight and Moon: An Odyssey Through Cancer.

Uschuk, Pamela REFUGEE Red Hen Press (Fiction Poetry) $16.41 5, 10 ISBN: 978-1-63628-019-6

Uschuk's poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice.

This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely issues. It's divided into four sections--"Skull Song," "Axis," "Liquid Book of the Dead," and "Speaking of Angels and Ghosts"--and deals with a broad spectrum of hurt, including that felt by refugees, victims of racism, people struggling with cancer, and victims of domestic abuse. The opening poem, "A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails," exemplifies Uschuk's distinct style, melding political outcry with a deep immersion in nature. The landscape she depicts is one drained by its struggles: "Feel the warmth of an otter's last dive / before ice takes the river. Police sirens / fade like contrails across the exhausted heart of this land." Meanwhile, poems such as "Intraperitoneal Chemo" offer an affectingly visceral tableau of cancer treatment: "the port sewn / onto my lower rib to pour toxins into my emptied womb." Despite such challenging themes, a note of positivity rings true throughout, with one speaker declaring, "I will not border on hysteria but will work on a poem to feed all of us." One of the most powerful poems, "Cracking One Hundred," ingeniously juxtaposes the migration of the monarch butterfly with the emigration of people from Central America. Its opening line provocatively reads, "Near the border, preschoolers worry about butterflies. / How can they fly over the wall?" The poem memorably closes with an image of butterflies arriving from Mexico on the White House lawn, "on bright rose petals tended by hands / the same color as earth that nourishes them." Uschuk's writing addresses worldwide injustices, although many salvos are clearly aimed at the Trump presidency, with elegant, razor-sharp lines such as "this poem doesn't have anything to do with comb-overs / or glacier eyes or gray suits signing laws a jaguar wouldn't stop to sniff." Still, this is also a spellbindingly compassionate collection rooted in the belief that redemption remains possible: "Earth carries us, heals our wounds as we spin on the hub of desire."

A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
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"Uschuk, Pamela: REFUGEE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562072/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dbcd26fe. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.

• Southern Review of Books
  https://southernreviewofbooks.com/2022/06/01/refugee-pamela-uschuk-review/
  Word count: 1301

  Defiant Transformation in “Refugee”
  At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word — “a person forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.” However, in Pamela Uschuk’s poetry collection Refugee, readers discover refugees of many kinds, not only refugees who fit the traditional definition but also those who redefine what it means to be a refugee. In Uschuk’s collection, refugees from racism seek shelter and justice in volatile environments, both human and animal refugees seek respite from climate change’s irreversible disasters, and those living with incurable diseases find the courage to continue pursuing a life amid the political, cultural, and environmental chaos each new day spent in astute observation of nature offers.

  Poems like “Talking Crow” balance nature’s tranquility with humanity’s inherent bend toward violence. Crows “pull dead leaves” as “day dries folded wings over the Carolinas.” Nature’s cleansing happens subtly as “sky weeps pavement a darker shade of tears.” Then, the poem’s true message comes forth as “bullet holes chip downtown streets.” An echo refrains with the thrice-repeated phrase “Don’t shoot,” a phrase made even more powerful by the author’s use of italics and centered by the images of human grief juxtaposed with a crow’s curiosity.

  A violence and grief of a different sort sears through the collection — that of facing an incurable illness like cancer. In “Green Flame,” readers encounter a speaker comparing their own mortality with that of a deceased hummingbird. The poem’s utilization of waxing and waning long and short lines creates a musicality in the poem:

  Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed
  into plate glass separating her and me
  before we could ask each other’s name. Green flame,
  she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb.

  The speaker observes the hummingbird’s death: “Almost on impact, she was gone.” The speaker also acknowledges the pain with which the bird’s death leaves them as well as the speaker’s own ability to grieve. The speaker’s grief is spontaneous, a moment erupting in the recognition that they are “too weak from chemo not to cry.” The poem’s conclusion hints at the speaker’s momentary nod to their own mortality as they carry the dead hummingbirds. The speaker also embraces existence’s futility:

  Mourning doves moaned, who, who,
  oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body
  sky would quick forget as soon it forget mine.

  A similar theme follows in the poem “Western Tanager,” a poem in which the speaker approaches a dead tanager. The speaker observes the “desiccated body perfect, black wings / tucked under the slick yellow back.” The speaker’s imagistic description of the deceased bird creates reverence and respect, a respect that permeates the poem as the speaker continues their descript. Most notable about this poem is the deviation in its continuous form that begins in stanza form. In this stanza, shortened lines and indentations create the sense of loosening and letting go, a structure that reinforces lines like “Time never rests.” The poem’s ending, however, is the most striking part of the poem. The speaker states, “its ghost prints leading us over a horizon giddy / with insistent light / we cannot conceive will ever end.” The speaker’s statement is stark, almost a warning about how humanity forgets that its collective actions, such as its over-reliance on fossil fuels, bear significant consequences on those it often overlooks or ignores.

  “Web” is another of the collection’s poetic gems. In this poem, once again Uschuk displays her ability to capture nature’s finest lessons about community and existence and the fragility of both. The poem’s speaker observes a web spun by a black widow on which “slow bottle flies land on to lay eggs / the spider wraps in silk.” The speaker recognizes their place in correlation to nature’s processes: “I watch the tiny mummies multiply / guarded by the arachnid who glares at me.” The speaker wonders “whether vine and spider despise / or love one another,” and asks if their relationship is “simple necessity” or “a union / sealed with the wax of cooperation.” The speaker later observes the dangling web, the spider’s vanishing, and the gleaming “slim arm of a vine / stretching to the doorknob, dexterous,” and they describe the relationship between the web and the plant as “beautiful as calligraphy suspended / between the living and the dead who’ve moved on.” The poem bears a strong message about the importance of balance, but more significantly, it echoes the message about existence and futility from “Green Flame” while reinforcing the idea that for communities to succeed, all parties must collaborate and uplift one another.

  As the collection segues toward its ending, readers discover “Levitation.” The poem opens with “the owl of sorrow” addressing an unnamed “her.” Readers can infer that the “her” is the levitation named in the poem’s title. The poem asks two distinct philosophical questions:

  How many of us have mistaken Venus
  for Jupiter with all its nattering moons
  strung like uncut opals along its equator?
  How many of us have believed the lie?

  These questions act as a shift in the poem, and the poem’s tone becomes political. Rather than relying on metaphor or simile to address the Trump administration’s persistent narratives about building a wall along the United States’ southern border, the speaker uses clear, raw imagery to present the issue. The speaker states:

  There are men whose tongues cut
  syllables into stilettos
  from the unfurling human cloth of kindness, men
  who would build the wall higher
  and thicker between countries.

  The poem’s tone becomes even more draconian as the speaker states that these men “would plant / surveillance cameras in their wives’ camisoles.” The poem becomes even more layered, especially as the speaker describes the poem’s mysterious “she” and the hopelessness and despair she carries because of the men’s actions. As the “she” flees, the speaker observes the state of entrapment in which the “she” lives. It is a debilitating environment, one that results in the ”she” wanting to “lick her own fingers, pull / them like plows down her lover’s cheeks.” The simile alludes to sexual violence, an image reinforced by the poem’s final lines: “but they’ve run off with the owl to count stars / in the bottom of someone else’s cup / from which she refuses to drink.” In essence, the most conspicuous of the lines is “from which she refuses to drink,” a line that ultimately makes the poem one of female defiance in the face of abusive male dominance and patriarchies which threaten female existence.

  Boldy defiant and passionately descriptive, Pamela Uschuk’s Refugee is a documentary in verse of the myriad ways in which brave people become lost in a chaotic world. Its messages about humanity, politics, violence and climate change are stark. Nonetheless, central to the collection’s message is one of transformation — one that will motivate anyone with a shred of humanity to navigate toward a new vision, one of positive social change and the reconnection with each other and with nature the entire world so desperately needs.

  Refugee
  By Pamela Uschuk
  Red Hen Press
  Published May 10, 2022