Rooms: New and Selected Poems

Rooms is a collection of new and selected poems by Diane Glancy. The rooms are spaces from previous collections – spaces influenced by memory and the pull of the past on the present. This collection of poems walks a line between balance and imbalance and struggles for an alignment of fragmented experiences. It tries to put into perspective the disparities of survival. It seeks to reconcile history and a broken heritage that results from a collision of cultures.

These poems, written from 1986-2004, include work from earlier collections, The Relief Of America, The Shadow's Horse, Stones For A Pillow, (Ado)Ration, Boom Town, Lone Dog’s Winter Count, Iron Woman, One Age In A Dream, Offering, and a chapbook, Coyote’s Quodlibet.

The title is taken from an idea, The Ames Room, which was a demonstration created by Dartmouth Professor Adelbert Ames in the 1940’s to show that we can look into an off-sided room, yet it will appear in proportion because the way we think something should be shapes our perception of it.

If the mind is a trickster shaping the misshapen into a familiar form and setting upright what has been turned on its side, what does a lopsided perception do? Does it skew what is not skewed? What if history, in this case, Native American history, has been turned on its side? How does the off-sided perception of the vanquished warp normal experience?

Rooms is a calling together of the tribes. These poems are a campground of voices in council.