“I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that Ray Young Bear is the best poet in Indian Country and in the top 46 in the whole dang world. Sacred and profane, profound and irreverent, his poetry pushes you into a corner, roughs you up a bit, maybe takes your wallet, and then gives you a long kiss goodbye.” —Sherman Alexie

“Ray Young Bear’s work is the gift of an anguished imagination marked with grief and wild humor. His writing alternately lashes and heals, but ultimately instructs from a deep vision of the world.” —Louise Erdrich

“These are remarkable poems. I read them over and over again, and I become more and more convinced that they proceed from a native intelligence that is at once ancient and contemporary, straightforward and ironic, provocative and insightful. The poet speaks from a kind of timeless experience; his voice is the voice of the coyote or singer of Beowulf or the inventor of words. The Invisible Musician is a work extraordinarily rich and rewarding.” —N. Scott Momaday

“It was clear from Ray Young Bear’s earliest poems that he was a poet of great ability. He has gotten better. The physical detail is ground, and there are mysterious interminglings of water and air that hold the worlds together. The Invisible Musician is rightly titled and a fine book.” —Robert Bly

“[Ray Young Bear is] a national treasure.” —Robert F. Gish

“Ray Young Bear is magic. He writes as if he lived 10,000 years ago in a tribe whose dialect happens to be modern English.” —Richard Hugo

“No one, absolutely no one, tells the tribal story like Young Bear.” —Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Ray Young Bear is a lifetime resident of the Meskwaki Settlement in central Iowa. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Virginia Quarterly Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, the American Poetry Review, and the Best American Poetry, and have been collected into three books: Winter of the Salamander (1980), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001). He also wrote Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (1995), a novel combining prose and poetry that was heralded by the New York Times as “magnificent.” Its sequel, Remnants of the First Earth (1998), won the Ruth Suckow Award as an outstanding work of fiction about Iowa.

The recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ray Young Bear has taught creative writing and Native American literature at numerous schools across the United States, including the University of Iowa and the Institute of American Indian Arts. A singer as well as an author, Young Bear is a cofounder of the Woodland Singers & Dancers, which performs contemporary and traditional tribal dances throughout the country.