Bury Me in Thunder, the full-length debut by syan jay, is an eviscerating collection, suffused with nature, ceremony, and pain. Here, a mother gives birth in a field of flowers, a child emerges from the stomach of a whale, while the speaker keeps working to locate “the epicenter of tenderness.”
Delivering an unflinching look into the consumption of Indigenous people, this collection sheds new light on the colonization of North America and how trauma is carried through intergenerational memory. In heartbreaking juxtaposition, the speaker presents the old and new worlds side by side, melding the two in stunning images while weaving folklore into the magic of these poems. To read this collection is to observe a brewing storm, to bear witness to the unburying of ancestors and their release as monsoon.
“In syan jay’s debut collection Bury Me in Thunder, they remind us that poetry is a vessel for movement, that these ancestral incantations call us back to moments of insurmountable emotionality. Their reverence for the craft is illuminating as they delicately bring life back to the living and dead, using poetics as memory, as time travel, as a catalyst for something beautiful to become.”
—Arielle Twist