Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heartbeat, the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring: physically, historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee, Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. 

 

With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth's poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Seventeen paintings complement his poetry, creating a dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the Haudenosaunee's mythic world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth's remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York's Indian communities. 

 

Reviews:

Selected for Good Reads list for Spring 2008, by National Book Critics Circle

 

Christopher Teutons review in Kenyon Review 

 

A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is witness, evidence, and manifestation of the poet, singer, storyteller in triumphal celebration.--Simon Ortiz

 

Eric Gansworths tender, melodic poetry reminds us that life is fleeting and that the individual moments stacked end-to-end build the rich collective of our consciousness.  Erics paintings lay a beautiful visual support to his words.

--Jaune Quick-to-See Smith