Beading Water, the first book of poetry by Mary Leauna Christensen, is an act of mourning and an act of making. To bead water, as the title suggests, is to string together one's tears, to gather loss drop by drop and shape it into art and meaning. Christensen, a mixed-race woman and enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, grieves her grandmother, her mother, and the maternal line that connects her to ancestral land and language. In these poems, mourning itself becomes a ceremony.
The collection moves across multiple forms and languages, asking how an Indigenous person navigates loss in a landscape that has never been post-colonial. Christensen's identity as an amalgamation of Indigenous, Latinx, and European heritage deepens these questions, expanding the book's resonance to broader conversations about mixed heritage, belonging, and self-determination. Throughout, the speaker comes to understand that the bond to Indigeneity persists through death and colonial erasure, and that to name this persistence is itself an act of reclamation. In its emotional reach and formal ambition, Beading Water speaks to anyone who has had to grieve a person and a world.
[Sample Poem]
DAUGHTER PRAYER
Within me/ a room is built for you/ great grandmother
great aunts/ a fire burns warm in the center/ save your
hands & knees/ those strong backs/ here/ floors always
glisten
i remember/ so little/ Appalachian fog/ at the funeral
home you wore pantyhose & black/ i've poured coffee
into Styrofoam/ nothing is wasted/ this building once
schoolhouse/ a small basketball court/ still outside
what is the difference/ between desks & pews
daughters granddaughters nieces/ you remember
small/ press your lips/ to cool foreheads/ before
casket lids close/ you've only grown old/ buried girls
are burying yourselves now/ in same red dirt/ how
recognizable are namesakes/ grandmother mother me
me gravedigger
me home maker
