A white woman navigates her fear and uncertainty to learn the ways of the people she called savages, until she begins to dream in Dakota, syllables sliding / on my tongue like tender pieces of meat. An African man, on display as a cannibal at the World s Columbian Exposition in 1893, sees into the future: humiliations heaped up / as on overfilled plates . . . / . . . a country that casually / consumes its own. A woman holds the gray-blue barrel of a gun in her mouth, the taste familiar / as her own blood.

With an unexcelled command of narrative verse, Lisa Chavez tells the...