In Geronimo’s Bones, award-winning author Nasdijj has written a love song to his brother, Tso—short for The Smarter One—and the powerful bond that sustained the two of them through the grim reality of their childhood. Filled with poetic intensity and unfiltered emotion, Geronimo’s Bones is a visceral reading experience.
Born to migrant parents—his father a self proclaimed “cowboy” and his Navajo mother, tender-hearted and flawed—Nasdijj knew little of the conformity spreading across America in the 1950s. He was busy surviving the migrant camps in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where despair and death were familiar faces. Nasdijj and Tso were boys racing trains and demons, whispering tales about Spider Woman, Sa, Geromino, and Coyote, the stories of their mother’s people that they had heard at bedtime. Nasdijj writes: “Geronimo is a voice who comes to me at night, when all the other creatures are asleep and the universe belongs to us.”
After their mother’s tragic death from alcohol, the young brothers were left in the care of their sometimes indifferent, often abusive, and occasionally loving father. Nasdijj and Tso rarely attended school, but they picked cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, peaches, beans, and artichokes. To escape this indentured servitude, Nasdijj and Tso eventually stole a car and ran away.
Told in brilliant flashes of poetry, narrative, and song, Geronimo’s Bones reveals a world that to this day remains hidden from most Americans. But Nasdijj’s work derives its special power from his ability to capture the universal emotions that we all share: hate and love, loss and remembrance.
From the Hardcover edition.
Born to migrant parents—his father a self proclaimed “cowboy” and his Navajo mother, tender-hearted and flawed—Nasdijj knew little of the conformity spreading across America in the 1950s. He was busy surviving the migrant camps in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where despair and death were familiar faces. Nasdijj and Tso were boys racing trains and demons, whispering tales about Spider Woman, Sa, Geromino, and Coyote, the stories of their mother’s people that they had heard at bedtime. Nasdijj writes: “Geronimo is a voice who comes to me at night, when all the other creatures are asleep and the universe belongs to us.”
After their mother’s tragic death from alcohol, the young brothers were left in the care of their sometimes indifferent, often abusive, and occasionally loving father. Nasdijj and Tso rarely attended school, but they picked cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, peaches, beans, and artichokes. To escape this indentured servitude, Nasdijj and Tso eventually stole a car and ran away.
Told in brilliant flashes of poetry, narrative, and song, Geronimo’s Bones reveals a world that to this day remains hidden from most Americans. But Nasdijj’s work derives its special power from his ability to capture the universal emotions that we all share: hate and love, loss and remembrance.
From the Hardcover edition.
