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Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum
This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets--or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this distance between the learning and the telling, Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to decide/who you must become.
[Sample Poem]
Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot
I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows
but as herself. She's not here for the art.
She's here for the minivans that devour
diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits
for the doors to retract and expel fruit,
Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.
She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps.
Like me, she won't appear human here.
While her legs bring her from one delicious
scrap to another, I work my own inventory.
Once my parents named me Swift Raven--
a real Indian Princess name.
I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black
braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly,
more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curve
calling for carrion. I'm not here for the art.
I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair
earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beak
ready to unbind carapace from quiver.
Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger
lurching from one disaster to another.
See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath.
While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story.
Once, my grandfather said, a long time ago
there was a raven. He opened a door
and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut.
What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: once
he closed the door and it was night. Today
I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth
is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,
my mouth is my body holding open the door.
Witness my body create day. See how the light
appraises my collection. See how the sunlight
exposes how shadow bleached everything white.
Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet's motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing--held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.
Housty's poems are textural--blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow--and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader's whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors' bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty's exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community.
Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.
CBC BOOKS 'CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN 2024'
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The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!
This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.
This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It's a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.
Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems - angry, funny, sad - demand a new world for Indigenous women.
Ceremony, community and connection - the poems of Once the Smudge is Lit carry the reader into deeply spiritual elements of Nishnaabe/Ojibwe culture. Co-written by Cole Forrest and Kelsey Borgford, the poetry of Once the Smudge is Lit highlights the Indigenous experience in post-colonial times through explorations of themes ranging from love to community. Bogford's and Forrest's verses seek to open a multidimensional window into the experience of being a contemporary Nishaabe. A profound sense of movement, connection, and continuity is emphasized by Tessa Pizzale's beautifully evocative illustrations, which include a line of smudge smoke that flows from page to page.
A tender, eclectic reflection from an Indigenous author on his life, work, and queer identity.
Evolving from a conversation between author Joshua Whitehead and Angie Abdou, Indigiqueerness is part dialogue, part collage, and part memoir. Beginning with memories of his childhood poetry and prose and traveling through the library of his life, Whitehead contemplates the role of theory, Indigenous language, queerness, and fantastical worlds in all his artistic pursuits. Indigiqueerness is imbued with Whitehead's energy and celebrates Indigenous writers and creators who defy expectations and transcend genres.
Winner, 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in English
Finalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award
Longlist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award
CBC Best Poetry of 2024
I am made of centuries & carbohydrates
the development of my molars
the hunger the teeth grew
has been with me since childhood
I can't escape the mouths of others
Brandi Bird's long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird's work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the I of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don't speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird's poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages--specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis--and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.
Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum
This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets--or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this distance between the learning and the telling, Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to decide/who you must become.
[Sample Poem]
Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot
I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows
but as herself. She's not here for the art.
She's here for the minivans that devour
diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits
for the doors to retract and expel fruit,
Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.
She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps.
Like me, she won't appear human here.
While her legs bring her from one delicious
scrap to another, I work my own inventory.
Once my parents named me Swift Raven--
a real Indian Princess name.
I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black
braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly,
more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curve
calling for carrion. I'm not here for the art.
I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair
earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beak
ready to unbind carapace from quiver.
Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger
lurching from one disaster to another.
See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath.
While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story.
Once, my grandfather said, a long time ago
there was a raven. He opened a door
and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut.
What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: once
he closed the door and it was night. Today
I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth
is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,
my mouth is my body holding open the door.
Witness my body create day. See how the light
appraises my collection. See how the sunlight
exposes how shadow bleached everything white.
Mother, Can I Say it Now? is a powerful and evocative collection of Indigenous poetry that highlights the resilience, strength, and profound beauty of Indigenous voices. Through vivid verses, this book explores themes of identity, culture, and the deep connection to the land that defines Indigenous life. Each poem offers a window into the lived experiences of the author, providing a unique perspective on belonging and the complexity of cultural heritage. From The Next Pretend-Indian to Things Abandoned in the Night, these poems confront issues of history, displacement, and self-discovery with striking authenticity. This collection not only showcases the creativity and power of Indigenous storytelling but also invites readers from all walks of life to reflect on their own connections to community and identity.
The poems in this book are grouped according to the directions of the Medicine Wheel: East for Beginnings, South for Innocence, West for Going Within, North for Elder/Wisdom, and the Centre for the Creator and the Great Mystery. Each section reflects both the universal human journey of growth and learning, and the author's personal experiences-spanning childhood, marriage, divorce, parenthood, and her parents' aging. The poems also explore the author's journey to reclaim and celebrate her Native heritage.
The poetics follow rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Originating from Webb-Campbell's deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves. Written from a mixed Mi'kmaq/settler perspective, this work also explores the legacies of colonialism, kinship and Indigenous resurgence.
Lunar Tides is the ocean floor and a moonlit night: full of possibility and fundamental connections.
Praise for Lunar Tides
In Lunar Tides, Shannon Webb-Campbell exposes a heart that's broken but also carried across the gulf between the moon and the sea, a heart that knows how grief takes up with the body. She shows us that grief is tidal, its ebb and flow pulsing like the moon and dog-earring our memories. This book reminds us that, grieving or not, we need to be held by something other than a theory. --Douglas Walbourne-Gough, author of Crow Gulch
Lunar Tides is both expansive and exacting, inviting us to feel our own relationship to the ocean, belonging and mortality. --Shalan Joudry, author of Walking Ground
A captivating search through one family's history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.
This is a book about grief, death and longing. It's about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one's gums, between incisors and canines.
Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders--to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.
Journey to the southernmost tip of the territories held by Canada. North of Middle Island opens with a collection of individual poems that capture the spirit of the relatively isolated, sparsely populated community of Pelee Island. The pieces explore contemporary Indigenous experience in the natural and built environments of the island and surrounding waters.
The book concludes with an epic, rarely true narrative of modern-day warriors, told in traditional Anglo-Saxon style--a new Lenape myth of how Deerwoman (Ahtuhxkwe) comes to Pelee Island. The events of this epic tale are loosely based on the infamous professional wrestler and actor Rowdy Roddy Piper's time on the island and Wrestlemania XII, Piper's notorious Backlot Brawl with fellow wrestler Goldust (Nkuli Punkw).
Follow acclaimed Moravian of the Thames First Nation poet D.A. Lockhart on this lyrical, epic journey into the unique culture and landscapes that lie just North of Middle Island.
The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie ndn utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change. Part memoir, part research project, this collection draws on Riddle's experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. This book refuses a linear understanding of time in its focus on women in the author's family, some who have passed and others who are yet to come. The Big Melt is about inheriting a Treaty relationship just as much as it is about breakups, demonstrating that governance is just as much about our interpersonal relationships as it is law and policy. How does one live one's life in a way that honours inherited responsibilities, a deep love for humour and a commitment to always learning about the tension between a culture that deeply values collectivity and the autonomy of the individual? Perhaps we find these answers in the examination of ourselves, the lands we are from and the relationships we hold.
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Manitoulin Island to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow's story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life. Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.
Slow Scrape brilliantly enacts a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Drawing on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts, the book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowing. In the words of Layli Long Soldier, Slow Scrape presents an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin, and colonization.
Includes an introduction by Layli Long Soldier as well as a dialogue between Lukin Linklater and editor for the first edition, Michael Nardone.
In this complex, at times dark, poetry collection from Inuk author Jamesie Fournier, readers are taken through the recesses of a character struggling with inner demons whispering into his mind. As he attempts to overcome his inner turmoil within a Colonial and contemporary system that oppresses him, the speaker guides readers through verse both ethereal and imagistic. Echoing artists as varied as Margaret Laurence and The Velvet Underground, this sweeping collection of bilingual verse deals with erasure, resilience, and--above all--resistance through the voice of one complex protagonist.
Never let anything or anyone stop you from following where your Spirit says it belongs...
Spirit exists in everything on Mother Earth. If we are open to it, Spirit may guide us through even the darkest of moments, to experience the illumination of healing and connection.
In this innovative blend of poetry and story, Ojibway and Mohawk Elder Dawn Smoke offers readers to share in all that lives in her heart, mind, and soul. With unwavering honesty, Dawn shares her life-story, and her passionate words of protection for Mother Earth and her people, while advocating against the ongoing violence faced by the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.
As a young girl confronted with the loneliness, anger and pain of being scooped from her birth family, Dawn courageously discovers her truth and the path towards healing. Reclaiming what was taken is not an easy feat, yet in doing so, Dawn powerfully reminds us of the Spirit in all around us, and the importance of community--of the family and friends that fill up all the empty corners of life.
Medicine Wheel Publishing is committed to sharing diverse voices and perspectives, creating a platform for stories that celebrate Indigenous cultures and inspire understanding and respect among readers of all ages.