Laura Da’ immerses readers in her poetic world

Over the next month, visitors to Urban Arts Space can have the unique experience of essentially stepping inside of a poem – “Why Lazarus,” by the Shawnee writer and poet Laura Da’, which unfurls throughout the corridor in the former Lazarus Department Store building.

“Really, the spirit of the exhibition is taking each stanza of the poem and … allowing it to become almost a room,” said Da’, whose exhibit opened earlier this week and continues through Nov. 15. “So, the exhibition asks you to move through the poem slowly and to understand each stanza as a moment in time. And then some of the stanzas even become a tactile experience in a way that mimics what’s happening in the poem. … I almost think of it as the poem becoming its own ecosystem.”

While the exhibition began with casual discussions a few years ago, with more formalized planning starting last fall, the roots of “Why Lazarus” actually extend back 20 years to a tribal visit Da’ made to central and southern Ohio from her home in the Pacific Northwest. Initiated as a homecoming to the tribal lands from which the Shawnee were forcibly exiled, Da’ said the trip served as “a return to a space of removal” that unearthed a host of complex feelings within her younger self. 

Accompanied by nearly 100 members of her tribe, Da’ traveled then to Ohio by bus, making stops in various locations with deep connections to her people: Xenia, Yellow Springs, Chillicothe, Zanesville, Circleville. 

“And it was objectively a beautiful thing, but there was also this heavy historical trauma. And where there are mechanisms and an understanding where you can process your historical trauma with other groups, [Indigenous] history has been so erased that it’s hard to know how to process the emotions that come up,” said Da’, who recounted the experience of seeing an outdoor play that told a heavily sanitized version of the life of Shawnee chief Tecumseh, and how she walked away feeling heavily conflicted by what unfolded on the stage. “As a descendant of people who were the victims of this truly horrific ethnic cleansing, it was surreal to go back to the site and see this fairly grand outdoor play. And I remember it being a real point of tension for me. And it created this incredible creative energy even though I wasn’t able to emotionally resolve how I felt about it.”

In the midst of that trip, Da’, who for years resisted the pull of poetry, believing herself to be foremost a fiction writer, holed up in assorted rural Ohio motel rooms and began sketching out the verses that would become her debut poetry collection, Tributaries, released in 2015. She followed with Instruments of the True Measure and Severalty, from 2018 and 2025, respectively. Collectively, the trio of releases converged to tell the story of the Shawnee from forced removal into the present, with the third book, Severalty, folding in aspects of the writer’s personal history, asking, at points, what it means to be disinherited or removed, and the importance of rediscovering a lost identity. (It’s this book in which the poem “Why Lazarus” can be found.)

For Da’, poetry exists as the ideal form in which to explore these more slippery ideas. “Sometimes I do like to write essays, and I experimented with that, but because of the level of ambiguity, and the lacuna of lost knowledge, of lost information, poetry really suited what I wanted to do,” she said. “Lyrically, it was the perfect mechanism to examine this history, and then also my own understanding of myself and my community.”

These complex, sometimes-amorphous ideas are underpinned by deep layers of research, with Da’ training herself to take an approach that first privileged Shawnee narratives, which she described as “a hard psychological shift.” “It’s an approach that goes against conventional education, which is really hierarchical and Eurocentric,” said Da’, who sought the assistance of Shawnee elders and prioritized oral traditions, in addition to pulling inspiration from other Indigenous models, including First Nation history and Māori language nests. “And as a member of the Shawnee tribe, I was privileged, because I had people who were generous with me, who guided me, who talked to me. And that was as important to the process as the writing itself.”

Within her poetry collections, there also exists for Da’ a strong connection to the natural world, which she traced to having grown up surrounded by nature in the Pacific Northwest. These environmental ties continued to flourish in her visits to Ohio, with the poet describing the different ways the state’s landscape imprinted itself on her verses, different shades emerging when she visited in the harvest season when compared with a more recent journey undertaken in early spring.

“There’s an aspect of seasonality that I feel deeply connected to,” said Da’, who will return to Ohio for a week beginning on Wednesday, Nov. 5, headlining a series of events that include a reading at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters on Friday, Nov. 7, and a migratory birds workshop at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center on Sunday, Nov. 9. (A full schedule of events and times can be viewed here.) “So, even though it’s a place I feel complicated about, I still have a strong tenderness and a pull toward the region.”