Layli Long Soldier Builds Poems Like Rooms, and Invites Us In

Layli Long Soldier's new book We arrives from Graywolf Press in 2026, and its title already does double work: the English "we" and the Lakota "wé," meaning "blood" — a shared lineage and life source. That economy is the book's method in miniature.

The poet discusses the collection in a conversation with artist Dyani White Hawk, her friend of 20 years. The two met as students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico — fellow Lakota in the Southwest, art students, and mothers whose now-grown children played together as toddlers.

What kind of book is We?

Reading it, White Hawk writes, is a visual experience. Long Soldier deploys text placement, formatting, omission, symbols, color, rhythm, pauses, reader choices and instructional language, alongside essays, short stories, photographs and visual art. The result is both literature and visual art at once.

White Hawk situates the new work beside Long Soldier's 2017 collection Whereas, praising "the strength and unique literary style" readers will recognize, while finding "the excitement and joy of new terrain" here. She calls the book life-affirming, advocacy, truth-telling, education and inquiry, all led by Lakota values and philosophy.

How does a poem find its form?

Long Soldier describes two working paths, and sometimes the shape simply arrives first. "Sometimes the form in my poems does come first," she said. "I'll wake up in the morning and I can see a shape. It feels almost as if a shape is waving hello, inviting me." That seen shape becomes the poem's first constraint.

Other times language leads. She enters what she calls "the quiet mental excavation for words to translate a feeling or idea onto the page," then begins trial and error to find the form. Some poems take months or years this way. The payoff is physical: "suddenly the poem gets traction and starts to move. I can feel it in my body, it's as if the poem says, 'Thank you!'"

The discipline is exacting. Certain forms — the poems in A Line Through Grief or Obligations — "require tight use of space, down to the centimeter." Her models for that patience? Beadworkers and sculptors among her friends and relatives. "If they can sit and patiently pick up one bead at a time with a needle, then I can practice that kind of attention as well."

Why does she guide the reader so deliberately?

Long Soldier often leads readers through a work with commands, reminders and encouragement, and her explanation is gently architectural. "In some ways, I consider the reader a guest," she said. "Isn't it funny that 'stanza' means room? So you could say that as I invite guests into a poem, I am guiding them through the rooms of a kind of home that I've built."

That hospitality has a strategic side. In the essay "Through the Pupil of Instinct," included in We, she shares painful first-hand accounts from survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre. The essay moves multi-directionally — from Wounded Knee to her child's day at school to a drive through Minneapolis with poet Heid Erdrich — and those shifts, she explained, "allow the reader time and breath to endure the moments of intensity."

Her position is precise: she wants to "go there" on harm, violence and injustice, but also wants readers able to sustain the energy required to go with her. Whether We finds the audience that Whereas did, the book makes one thing plain — Long Soldier is building rooms, and the door is open.