The Choctaw Word for Crazy sits on the sharp edge of passion and fanaticism, of giddiness and fury. Through personal verse and Choctaw tradition, Wakaya Wells contends with what it is to be mad (tasembo) and what it means to heal. They situate intimate moments of mental illness with family, love, gender, religion, history, colonization, Queerness, and Indigeneity.
This debut collection captures and sustains the contradictions inherent in our existence: what we label as crazy, what we worship and what we deny. Wells charts a dizzying map to healing through trauma and euphoria and the mundane. However blurry and interminable the path may be, this book helps us to get on it.
