Rock Piles Along the Eddy

Rock Piles Along the Eddy is the second poetry collection by poet, storyteller, actor and playwright Ishmael Hope. Rock Piles Along the Eddy elevates Indigenous thought and lifeways, intermingling the landscapes of personal experience, Indigenous cultural knowledge, stories, familial connections and the spirit and knowledge of land and sea. Indigenous thought threads through Rock Piles Along the Eddy, with its guiding light the wisdom often shared by Hope's Elders: there is a spirit in everything. As current Alaska Writer Laureate, Ernestine Hayes, comments on this collection, "Ishmael Hope's poetry resonates with love of ancestral place and love of life. I walked with him along the beaches and rivers he loves, listened to the stories he remembers, tasted the wine, heard the ancient whispers, felt the nettles and moss. 'Everything is food, everything feeds,' he tells us, and his poems bear out his promise. He has given us words that nourish." Ishmael Hope is an Inupiaq and Tlingit poet, storyteller, actor and playwright living in Juneau, Alaska with his wife Lily Hope and four children. Notable recent projects include his first poetry collection, Courtesans of Flounder Hill; serving as the lead writer for Kisima Ingitchuna: Never Alone, produced by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and E-Line Media; and co-directing, with Scott Burton, a documentary on Tlingit art produced by KTOO Public Media.