Motherhood, trauma, and familial history are woven together into a powerful collection from the award-winning author of What Became My Grieving Ceremony.

Beginning with a revelation of familial sexual abuse, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People charts the impact of this revelation on the speaker. From the pain of estrangement to navigating first-time motherhood in the midst of a family crisis, Morgan explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.

Cara-Lyn Morgan joins those young Canadian poets who are driven by family experience to communicate with their pasts in order to inform their futures. Morgan's complex cultural history that was generated from her M?tis mother and her Afro-Caribbean father necessitates an exploration of their struggles as distinctive cultures. It also insists on understanding the connectivity of her ancestral, cultural roots and the disparate values that shaped her.

What Became My Grieving Ceremony draws us into a sprawling family, and we rub shoulders with Fr. Ed; Patrick, the daemonic uncle; Margrette Monkman; Leotha and with the author herself as she conducts her personal and familial archeology, locating the self in its web of relations. Morgan is also on a linguistic search for a lost Michif, that unique Western Canadian tongue, born of the union of two races. Following her, I was led to the wakes, the barns and various kitchens of her people, where I found myself both a stranger yet also home. - Tim Lilburn

Elegant and empathic, this fine book plumbs not only grief, but takes us through its rites: the anticipation of loss and its initial sting; the shouldering of a despair so vivid it hurts to succumb to memory's unheralded quietude. Drawing from her M?tis and Trinidadian heritage, Morgan counterpoints the unassuaged suffering of her people with her family's, experiencing them as only one alert person can. Open yourself to these poems, become their host, and live their affirmative message as your own. -John Barton

In Cartograph we are taken through the deeply personal journey of healing from an injury to the wounds of colonization. Cara-Lyn Morgan takes us body part by body part through her being as she recovers, finding the healing for each ligament and tissue within herself. She also takes us to the places of her childhood, her family's ancestral and contemporary lands, and reconciles colonial traumas there as well. To a young niece of hers she writes:

I have brought you here
to give to you the only thing
there is. May you be wild,
a girl-pup mine
from long ago.
(from m?scacak?nis)

With her words she creates physical and metaphorical maps, reclaiming the art of cartography from its colonial imposition of borders and railway lines on traditional lands (the latter a nod to Morgan's M?tis grandfather and his brother who worked on the railway); these she weaves with the anatomical charts used in medical and healing practices (in reference to her father, a physician) to inform her poems. Cartograph is a book of optimism, of the possibilities of recovery now and for the future, of reconnection, and, ultimately, of healing.