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Stories
by Kimberly Blaeser
This bold and genre-defying prose debut by the prizewinning poet incorporates social, historical, and supernatural elements to create a collection that is both contemporary and timeless, communal and deeply intimate.
Kimberly Blaeser's singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.
At the heart of the collection is the story "Red Ants," which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor's smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.
For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.
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This information about Red Ants was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kimberly Blaeser is the former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts, Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, and was the 2024 Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and a Tin House Fellow in 2024. Among her many awards, she received the 2025 Poets and Writers' Writer for Writers award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (2021). She has published six poetry collections and her story "The Making of Monsters" was selected for the second installment of the bestselling anthology Never Whistle At Night, Never Whistle at Night II: Back for Blood (Vintage, Fall 2026). Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, and grew up on the reservation in northwestern Minnesota.
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