 Her style is powerfully evocative and spare and she employs mostly free verse (though aware of other forms).Though for the most part she is a lyric poet, traces of oral Indian tradition and the chant come through in her poetry.As she says in her introduction to Bone Dance, “if the words cannot be sung in the genuine language of the old way, they must be written.”

Another stylistic choice she makes is frequently beginning with an epigraph from the written records of the long assault on Native Peoples.