“Draw me encircled // in something // other than gasoline.” The poems of Rose Quartz hum with the naked energy of one who has found her way home after a journey rife with difficulty and who has the scars to show for it. In them, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe moves from intimate scenes of peril—a car accident, an unwelcome advance at a party, a miscarriage—to the salvific, exhilarating punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and the centering shores of her Coast Salish ancestors. Along the way, she peers into the darker corners of her own search for belonging, and finds there glittering stones dense with meaning and the power to move forward.

As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above—rose—vie for the speaker’s embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power. 

Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe is a Coast Salish author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes. She received a double MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Tacoma, WA.

Milkweed Editions, 2023

8.5” x 5.5”, paperback

136 pages