Sharon Doubiago

Naked to the Earth is a wide-ranging, lyrical, jarring, playful, elegiac, dissonant, amazing quest to understand who we are and how we became who we are. This book will make you think—deeply and profoundly—about relationships, culture, obligation (to ourselves and others, those we love and those we may not love but should), violence and war. It is as reflective and thought-provoking, as lyrically beautiful as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and as searing an indictment of our past and present as Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. This book is the distillation of a lifetime by a poet who has personally experienced injustice and the misuse of power, but has not given anyone the power to make her hate. It is the work of a master poet in complete control of her craft, looking back, looking forward, reflecting on life and the human condition, distilling it to its essence so that she—and we—can see with clarity the beauty, the commonality and the interconnectedness in all of us as we travel through our history, to make sense of it, the world we have created, the world we inhabit, and our place in it.

With this book-length poem in the tradition of investigative poetry as advocated by Ed Sanders when he wrote, “…poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history,” Sharon Doubiago takes on both the Church and State over issues of race, gender, sexual abuse, injustice and the perversion of power in a complex search for justice and reconciliation within the context of history and the very personal story of one man - a full-blooded Shuswap-Lillooet Indian - accused and convicted of a crime he claims he did not commit.

"My soul looks back," James Baldwin said, "and wonders how I got over." Volume Two of Sharon Doubiago's memoir, My Father's Love, reveals the legacy of her father's sexual and psychological abuse that continued throughout his life and the toxic effects it has had on the lives of everyone in the family. How family secrets ripple through succeeding generations with devastating results, how family myths become more powerful than truth, how they are maintained at any cost, and how denial blinds us to what we do not want to, or cannot bear to see. Most of us never realize we are in denial but Doubiago is not most of us, for she is a poet of exceptional power and insight. This is a book about all of us, how we deceive ourselves and others, believe what we want to believe, what we are conditioned to believe, how we are, as R.D. Laing put it, "destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love." America collectively is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My Father's Love helps us "to get over."

"No other book has ever portrayed so vividly and convincingly the betrayal that adults practice every day on the children of this world."
"Deeply textured, carefully drawn, manages one of the hardest tasks of a writer: to coax understanding from confusion, to journey from weakness to strength."
Finalist, 2010 Northern California Book Awards, Literary Nonfiction

“ ... In her wide and deep and unflinching vision, the love poem expands and expands, transcends all borders and laws, becomes historical and political and mythic, epic and cosmic, merges the erotic and the spiritual, the tender and the violent, breaks the heart open again and again.”
Finalist, Paterson Poetry Prize, 2009
The Glenna Luscha Distinguished Poet Award, 2009.

"I was amazed by her reading. This whole soul came out and in detail and quite complete. She's very conscious...She sounds like Kerouac, like really good. The energy, but it's more the details, precise details. Doubiago sees things, she notices things in the middle of these crisis moments...." Allen Ginsberg

PEN USA West, 2001 Finalist, Poetry Book Awar

A 298 page poem of traveling with her 15 year old daughter through Columbia, Equador and Peru, climaxing at Machu Picchu.

Nominated twice for a National Book Award
Best Book, 1992. LA Weekly

Literary Oregon: One Hundred Books, 1800-2000: Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, January 2005. (The most important one hundred books in Oregon literary history--in collaboration with Oregon State Library.) www.ochcom.org/100Books.
Gloria Steinem's Woman Writer Award, 1989
One of the Ten Best Books of 1988: The Bloomsbury Review, January 1989

"One great poem, an epic in the proper sense, a personal journey but also the foundation myth of a culture: the seeker is the American earth herself incarnate in the voice of the poet, and the hero is collective—the voices of its living commingling with those of the dead, through 'the terror of history.'"