Tina Harrach Denetclaw is a clinical pharmacist by trade. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Silver Birch Press | Poetry and Prose…from Prompts Series, The RavensPerch, Leading the Way: The Wisdom of the Navajo People, Synkroniciti, and Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. She was a semi-finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and in the Finishing Line Press 2025 Open Chapbook Competition. She and her Dinè (Navajo) husband live in Northern California where her husband is a biology professor, first reader of her poems, and favorite muse for her writing. They have five cats.
PRAISE:
Tina Denetclaw’s poetry collection, Life Travels, is strung with moments of bright reflection and tender celebration of nature, family, the memories we share with those we love, even of the ways the world hurts us. Denetclaw reminds us that, after all, “what sticks in the tread / [is] too often the burr / the broken edge.” In these meditative poems, the past echoes against the present’s surface and appears in a face, yarn crocheted into a blanket in an aunt’s favorite stitch, a beloved chair passed down among the generations. Though Denetclaw’s poems sometimes carry great sorrow along with their beauty, this book will leave you full of “quiet joy for the now / that we have.”
–Francesca Bell, author of What Small Sound
In this graceful debut collection of poems Tina Denetclaw confides sometimes getting lost in her neighborhood but by a smidge of light in the night sky always knowing the way to the center of the galaxy. She gives us her center in the landscape and family that make her life. Her German and Danish ancestors settled the plains of Nebraska and lived “with intention and courage and calm grit.” She sees the landscape of Nebraska through geologic time and the landscape of family through the domestic details of food, a favorite chair, a beloved cat, a broken clock. Some of the strongest poems are love poems to her Diné husband as they face his life-threatening illness with grit and courage.
–Catharine Clark-Sayles, MD, MFA, author of The Telling, The Listening
In Life Travels, poet Tina Denetclaw demonstrates how to balance heart and hearth, perennialism and perseverance, beauty and bravery. In this aptly-titled collection, we travel the many paths—both taken and untaken—of a life. Often enjoyed and sometimes endured, these memories are always deeply considered and carefully crafted into poems, steeped in “quiet joy for the now.”
–Chad Frame, author of Little Black Book and Smoking Shelter
NEWS AND REVIEWS:
https://www.midwestbookreview.com/lbw/oct_26.htm#poetry
Nancy Sobanik –
The title poem from Tina Harrach Denetclaw’s chapbook, Life Travels, imparts this keen observation:
“what sticks in the tread/too often the burr/the broken edge/the smite”
Briefly hinting at existential despair about the vagaries of life’s turns, the poems in this book overwhelmingly return the reader again and again to an optimism born of the strong foundation that love of family and life brings.
The poems in this book bring the reader on journeys. Trips through memory introduce steadfast forebears by whom the author has been shaped. Homey vignettes reveal a people who knew the value of hard work and struggle, yet never lacked in creating the comforts that make a home a home. It is through exploration of the past that a sense of shared identity and kinship is gained.
These largely prose poems are finely crafted, elevating poetic story-telling into a sacred tradition that honors the path of Denetclaw’s pioneer ancestors. The final third of the book contains poems addressing a beloved husband’s life-threatening illness, faced with fortitude and grace.
This is a book that invites the reader to both curl up with a cup of tea and a slice of comfort in the form of Aunt Shirley’s pecan pie, then tugs at heartstrings as the author and her husband wait for news in “Mile Marker in the Dark”.
This book’s lush descriptions of family life and enduring generational wisdom and love make this an uplifting and inspirational read.