Sign-In
Cart
Ahkonachimu: John Prince Centos
Paperback
Historical FiguresCanadian HistoryGeneral Poetry
Publisher Price: $17.00
ISBN13: 9781928120612
Publisher: Kegedonce Press
Published: Sep 25 2027
Pages: 159
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
The cento is a form of poetic collage, in which poems are built out of lines from other texts reconfigured into new patterns of meaning. Here, the source materials are not other poems but the journals of John Prince (1796-1870), the controversial Upper Canadian military leader and politician famous - if not infamous - for his oratory. Lockhart re-envisions Prince through a Lenape lens as Ahkonachimu, or the Maker of Long Speeches, a man who uses his legendary rhetorical skills in the service of a very personal colonialism.
How, asks Lockhart, would the Lenape construct Prince, given their different understandings? Using Prince's own words, Lockhart allows his subject to reveal himself as a paragon of the 19th-century settler enterprise, a self-made individualist and skilled demagogue, whose acts and words break hard against Lenape ideas of governance, leadership, and the use of language. And yet Prince is also a rebel, at odds with authority and in his liquor-fueled dynamism as likely to make enemies and alienate the Crown as make friends and advance it.
The ensuing portrait is complex and nuanced, and provides new and unexpected insights into a transformative period in Turtle Island's history. Ahkonachimu is also entertaining. It paints a raucous picture of a world in transformation, a world rife with conflict both physical and ideological, internal and external, domestic and foreign, settler and Indigenous.
Also from
Lockhart, Daniel
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover