Mother

mother is a groundbreaking debut from Northern Cheyenne writer M.S. RedCherries. Winner of a 2024 National Book Award finalist for Poetry, this hybrid collection of poetry, prose, and imaginative storytelling traces the path of an Indigenous child adopted into a non‑Native family and the journey back to ancestral ground through memory and voice.

The unnamed narrator pieces together family lore, oral histories, and imagined futures from the stories shared by their mother, father, sister, and brother who remained on the reservation. These fragmented yet fierce vignettes reflect loss, longing, and quiet resistance, raising profound questions about identity, inheritance, and the meaning of belonging in a landscape shaped by colonization.

RedCherries molds form and content together in a voice both tender and defiant, melding lyricism with historical witness. Each page pulses with the tension between displacement and reclamation, trauma and resilience, past and possibility.

mother is not simply a book but a reclamation of story and spirit. It is a haunting and necessary work about how we find ourselves through fragments of memory and how love can reconstruct a home previously lost.