The accomplished poet and influential editor Duane Niatum was born in Seattle on 13 February 1938. His mother, Dorothy Patsy, was of Klallam (Salish) extraction; his father was an Italian-American merchant seaman. His mother's subsequent marriage to Howard McGinnis, an Anglo commercial fisherman, gave the future poet the surname he would carry into young manhood, though the marriage broke up after a few years. Niatum has described his growing up as troubled and confused; he was insecure about whether he belonged to the Indian or the Anglo branch of his family, and he rebelled against his status as a mixed-blood. After several stints in reform schools he enlisted in the navy at seventeen. Further troubles led to a month in a marine brig, vividly fictionalized in his short story "Crow's Sun"(1991). He spent some of his naval duty in Japan, where his interest in the artistic relations between cultures was...