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, polgnancy, 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.

"A heart-healing, mocs-on-the-ground story of music, family and friendship." -- Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of TANTALIZE and RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME
Lewis "Shoe" Blake is used to the joys and difficulties of life on the Tuscarora Indian reservation in 1975: the joking, the Fireball games, the snow blowing through his roof. What he's not used to is white people being nice to him -- people like George Haddonfield, whose family recently moved to town with the Air Force. As the boys connect through their mutual passion for music, especially the Beatles, Lewis has to lie more and more to hide the reality of his family's poverty from George. He also has to deal with the vicious Evan Reininger, who makes Lewis the special target of his wrath. But when everyone else is on Evan's side, how can he be defeated? And if George finds out the truth about Lewis's home -- will he still be his friend?
Acclaimed adult author Eric Gansworth makes his YA debut with this wry and powerful novel about friendship, memory, and the joy of rock 'n' roll.

Welcome to the Seventh Annual Conference of the Society for Protection and Reclamation of Indian Images. Expect to find, amid all the refined cultural observations, academic posturing, and political maneuvering, an Indian who defies anyone to protect, let alone reclaim, "her" image. This is Shirley Mounter, a Tuscarora woman and the chief storyteller among the acerbic, eloquent, and often hilarious speakers who overflow the pages of this latest novel by the noted Onondaga writer Eric Gansworth. A lecture on Indian stereotypes by Shirley's daughter, art historian Annie Boans, calls forth Shirley's recollections, whose outpourings deposit us in the turbulent yet restorative waters of modern Iroquoian reservation life, always flowing and eddying around kin. Indeed, Shirley's house and land are now, after a long and bitter fight, forever lost to her in the construction of a water reservoir that feeds the government's hydroelectric plant. The story of this battle is the story of Shirley's generation and the faltering generation that follows--of violent love and losses, of children turning away only to find themselves forever negotiating the nuances of identity, of popular culture in jarring juxtaposition with the sometimes even more incredible realities of Native life. Weaving a complex narrative illustrated with his own paintings, Gansworth creates a rich, wry, and multifaceted tapestry of the intricate twists and turns of coincidence, memories, and stories that bind Native families together.