Trevino Brings Plenty: Press

"Embracing an identity of twenty-first century west coast urban squalor, Trevino Brings Plenty created a madly cruising momentum barreling down the page instantly akin to narrowing proximities within a panorama of cityscapes, apartments and dives. The resulting irresistible fervor brings a flavor of first to a long-awaited banter. hold on; this on is fully loose."
—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Author of Off-Season City Pipe

"A laugh heard around the world, a mandatory message for the rest of America. Trevino Brings Plenty fires off his poetic shot from the northwest coast and its reverberations are necessary. Necessary for an understanding of the Indian world - its humour, its pain, its absolute refusal to fit the mold of the other's expectations of what our red world should be."
—James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair

"Trevino L. Brings Plenty's work is deceptively straightforward. The rich values of human struggle rumble between lines of the voice and vicissitude of marked page. These poems are viscously inked illustrations of bleak obscured in popular American culture."
—Elizabeth Woody, author of Seven Hands, seven Hearts: Prose and Poems

From Lakota Journal
Book Review
Real Indian Junk Jewelry by Trevino Brings Plenty
By Abena Songbird
Journal Correspondent

This book was recently passes to me by another poet friend, Rapid City's Luke Warm Water.

It initially reminded me of Luke's own work, as well as Sherman Alexie's work, but then I realized - they are of the same generation.

This is a strong voice of an age, an urban stylist with reservation roost, as Adrian Louis tags him: a young Indian Odysseus.

At first glance you might think that Brings Plenty is just another drunk, this volume of poetry just another "ode to the grape" and attempt to write him off as another male Indian in love with his own destruction: "George as a child broke open on if the bottles. He wanted to wander the inside, to see why it carried his father's tears" (George Finds Medicine).

You may think, because of all the drinking poems, the aggressive 49ing, the last poem in the book about attempted suicide and the fact that his chapters are illustrated with nooses, that he is incapable of painting any course for his people, of producing any vibrancy.

You would be wrong - you would miss all the juice.

You might think his voice larger-than-life, an Indian Hemingway - a 240 pound Skin who can guzzle 40 ounces while smoking cigars, fearing the DT's. A Lakota sure enuf with horse references, wrestling with life: "true when you're an Indian there's always a war to fight."

But he is a true word-painter, a strong voice being forged into mastery: "I have to till these pages, knead these books" (Taking Advantage).

Trevino shows that he is as familiar with style and contemporary poetic forms as writers such as Pablo Neruda, Rumi, Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg.

He is familiar with the rhythms and revolution of jazz and with the best of Native poets/writers such as Joy Harjo, Adrian Louis, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday.

On of my favorite pieces, "The Old Moan," is truly big blues and finger bleeding rust on strings - a whinny of slid guitars, the pain of a people. He knows his jazz and blues and uses these rhythms well: "I feel history sag further in me. Moan, of love, of loss, grief and happiness, of the loud and tranquil, of emptiness kept in the silence between phrases of your melody."

In "The Ways of Medicine" (about a tenor sax playing Skin), Brings Plenty writes: "this was the morning prayer dance with liquid jazz shooting through my head."

What truly excites me about this youthful voice (hey, He's only 29) is he is a poet for the people. In the poem "12" he writes: "I was here in love with nightmares, horse bones and the desires of wishes."

An urban Indian, some of his best stuff is reserved for the city of Portland.

Trevino writes a truly historical Indian Howl-esque (ala Ginsberg) anthem in "I am In the Reservation of My Mind" a roll call to all experiences Indian: "I saw the best live of my reservation destroyed by manifest destiny, hungered in commodity lines, passed out in broke down cars, eight hours until gas was gone and froze in a South Dakota snow storm. Who inhaled lines of meth driving along empty HWYS, believed in American dreams, held cigars and turned to wood, looked at America again and turned to a salt pillar."

And lastly what sister couldn't love his poem "Indian Woman", and who couldn't relate to his ode to a car: "My Pony?"

Check it out! As Adrian Louis writes on the back cover of the book: "Trevino Brings Plenty's tales focus on Native survival in the face of modern American displacement. He is a young Odysseus, head up, going forward strongly, only occasionally getting distracted by urban sirens singing their songs of destruction. A dynamic, new Indian voice."


Editor's note: Abena Songbird is an Abenaki poet, vocalist, and Native American event coordinator. Originally from Vermont, she lived in the San Francisco Bay area before moving to Rapid City.

“Trevino, with his raw whiskey-soaked voice, is a barroom bard of great evocation. Unhappily the bar life causes dead Indians. Stay alive, man! I’m hoping in your maturity you’ll become the Crazy Horse poet me and the elders are waiting for. Spirit-filled words is what the planet needs.”
—Walt Curtis

“In these poems the intimacy is spicy, the lyricism adventurous and the spirit a vigorous dancer. Trevino Brings Plenty, robust as a jazz musician improvising around the traditional American melody line, provides beautiful renditions of a personae’s body and soul testifying about some of the other themes of the America we have become. He is a writer to follow as the years go by.”
—Primus St. John

“Trevino Brings Plenty’s tales focus on Native survival in the face of modern American displacement. He is a young Indian Odysseus, head up, going forward strongly, only occasionally getting distracted by urban sirens singing their songs of destruction. A dynamic, new Indian voice.”
—Adrian C. Louis

Real Indian Junk Jewelry

By Trevino L. Brings Plenty

(Bootleg Po' Hymns Publishing, 105 pages, $12.95)

Whether menacing Portland open-mic poetry nights or dropping jaws at the Seattle Art Museum by reading "To Kill A Dirty Hippie" instead of his museum prescribed Native work, six-foot-one Trevino L. Brings Plenty isn't often a flowery, dainty writer.

But in Real Indian Junk Jewelry, Brings Plenty harnesses this seeming runaway malice and, without wrenching back the reigns, dares to expose how subtle and humane the knife wielding poet can be.

Avoiding the tedious introspection that plagues many young poets, Brings Plenty's unrhymed, largely unmetered collection determinedly walks us past gentle winos slumbering safely, tortured lovers locked in silent bedroom battles, and, yes, an unwholesome display of barroom humor.

Outbursts like "The Last Great Indian Casanova," in which the author likens his genitals to a tomahawk that will, "split you like a log," aren't enough to mar the conscientious, tailored realism of the surrounding poems.

The book's startling dualism seems to only confirm that this is not an act. Brings Plenty isn't dressing up like an American Indian, or a poet. He was just born that way.

Engaging and driven, Real Indian Junk Jewelry is the work of an poet who, not hung-up and limited by racial stereotype, will surely continue to make his name in literary circles for honest writing.

Each chapter opens with a picture of a rope that successively twists to form a noose. These poems don't come from a moping, maudlin suicide. The rope, I fear, is meant for us.

Or maybe it's only symbolic of a final resolution, when all the poet's realities are explained and there's nothing to do but swing.

In chapter four, when the hangman's knot is complete, Brings Plenty writes: "Damn, if I could do it all over again I wouldn't do anything at all."

POET FOR THE PEOPLE

Poetry readers have spoken!

After counting 425 responses to our invitation to nominate a poet laureate for Oregon, the majority have elected Portland poet, Judith Barrington for the, as yet, unofficial post.

Word has come to WW that we might have beat various local arts organizations to the punch by launching our search for a state poet before they could roll out official plans. We don't apologize for our wild impatience and, therefore, recommend Ms. Barrington to the various arts committees as a great candidate for the office of state versifier.

Barrington, an Anglo-American poet and memoirist, is the author of Horses and the Human Soul, Lifesaving: A Memoir and Trying to be an Honest Woman.

Portland poets Paulann Peterson, Leanne Gravel, Dan Raphael and Carlos Reyes were runners up, while two young poets, Trevino Brings Plenty and emily Riley, inspired an impressive write-in campaign after canvassing various bars and clubs with election posters.

In addition to the 10 names on our ballot, readers nominated another 28 poets, an impressive display of both the talent and the enthusiasm for poetry in Portland.