Reviewed by Libby Gerdes

Something Small of How to See a River
by Teresa Dzieglewicz
Tupelo Press
Paperback, October 2025, ISBN: 9781946482822

In a lecture and Q&A session with my graduate poetry workshop, Teresa Dzieglewicz said she didn’t set out to write Something Small of How to See a River — but it was the book she had to write after her experience teaching at the Očhéthi Šakówin Camp school in 2016 amid opposition to the forthcoming construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

While it’s no wonder a book of such craft took ten years since the main timeline of its content to release, it remains timely. Amid my writing this review, on May 21, 2026, the Associate Press story A decade after Standing Rock protests, contentious segment of Dakota Access oil pipeline gets OK made top news and thus a spot on the “Nation” page of the regional newspaper at which I work.

That importance Dzieglewicz felt to write the book resonates in the world and on the page. The reader feels it from the jump: the foreword and timeline of events — which gives the reader the necessary historical and cultural context upfront, unlike many collections — and the first poem, which takes place a year after she left camp: “though / the river is not untouched, still, it squalls with life.”

In this debut, Dzieglewicz is a profound poet whose descriptions are striking and symbolic in even the most common of scenes:

At the end of that page, the reader gets the first of a painstaking list of “Arrests to date: 29,” an active sense of the violence unfolding behind the page’s scenes. That sense is further amplified in found texts in other poems. “By the numbers” takes the form of a press release with a chart of hours the North Daoka Highway Patrol logged in the six months of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest, higher than they would typically fly over the course of four years, with the footnote: “The white noise of the helicopters still brushes my skin like a nightgown, leaves red welts in the shape of my eyes. I wake with my keys in my hands, ready, if they come, to take the students and run.”

But Dzieglewicz acts as  more than a poet, too. She’s a collaborator, an elevated journalist, and a crucial character herself.

A collaboration with Alayna Eagle Shield includes quotes from her great-great grandmother, Moving Robe Woman:

The reader sees Dzieglewicz highlight oppressed voices by the first section break HEADWATERS, the first of a series of interviews with children at the camp, after the opening poem.

But more than a disembodied reporter, Dzieglewicz develops the person writing the story, someone with her own relationships, history, and limitations. She does not shy away from acknowledging her own whiteness:

The story of camp has a bleak ending —

— a story that stays bleak, as seen in the recent OK to continue construction. Still, Dzieglewicz finds lingering goodness: in relationships made and maintained at camp, as we see in a 2024 eclipse party, but also in her everyday life:

About the reviewer: Libby Gerdes is a reporter in Southern Illinois. They graduated Murray State University witg a BFA in Creative Writing and a BS in Professional Writing in 2023.