Cloud Missives

Finalist for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award

Finalist for the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award

Finalist for the 2024 Writers League of Texas Book Awards

"A masterwork."―Diane Seuss

"This incredible debut announces Kenzie Allen as an important voice in Native literature."―Craig Santos Perez

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture--the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond--fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you--and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.