[In the following review, Hauptman provides a highly positive assessment of What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York.]

We have recently witnessed the emergence of a strong Native American literature with national visibility, if only limited recognition. Female poets like Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan, Leslie Silko, and Anita Endrezze Probst have contributed much to this rich vision. Wendy Rose's What Happened When The Hopi Hit New York spirals forth from a native American matrix, combines indigenous concerns with contemporary and personal needs, enhances tradition through current idiom, and broadens belief, ideology, and purpose through metaphoric articulation. This is the magic that comes from transformation, heightened language, and cadenced rhythms. This is the magic of poetry.

Rose is a gifted poet and artist whose line drawings invariably complement her poetic statements. This new volume consists of a group of poems that take the reader on a journey from California to New England. Impressions garnered from travel in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Vermont, New York and many other locations elicit personal reactions, memories and especially an awareness of nature, which is present even in urban and metaphysical land-scapes. For example, graffiti unearthed in the bowels of New York's subway, produce not political objurgation, but interpretation from some future anthropologist:

       "Score"
 
       Our language is precious.
       These signs mark our claims.
       We breathe from where we emerged
       to this place chosen for us.
       We speak, we watch, we sing for signs.
       We torment, we tease,
       we will not let you hear the words
       for they are sacred. They are
       who we are and we they.
       You may someday hurt us
       with the parts left behind:
       parings of hair, toenail,
       spirit and song.

Rose is fully aware of the ongoing battle and the need for change and amelioration, but she never loses sight of the magic:

                          At midnight
      the singers shine
      and beat the drum of
      a new kind of sun.

That is the difference between polemic and poetic vision.