Marie-André Gill (Innu) was born on the first day of spring, the same day that Chernobyl went boom. She’s the kind of girl who can’t get enough of books books and isn’t quick on the Ski-Doo. She digs poetry, truly, madly, deeply. And she would like to get around to writing a novel some day or other. In the meantime, she’s studying literature at university for the fun of not knowing where it might lead. She is from Mashteuiatsh.
Marie-Andrée Gill
Books (2)
Heating the Outdoors
$20.00
Format:
Paperback
Text Content Territories:
Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi); Mashteuiatsh (Pekuakamiulnuatsh);
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781771668149
Synopsis:
Synopsis:
You're the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart
It's just impossible you won't be back
to quench yourself in my crème-soda
ancestral spirit
Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.
In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in Gill's interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate her interior landscape—of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.
Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Québécoise woman.
Awards
- 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Best Published Poetry in French winner. This book is the translated version in English.
Reviews
"I'm literally captivated by the accuracy, the beauty. They taste of honey, these poems." —Karine Villeneuve, bookseller, Page par Page
"Heating the Outdoors is a stunning collection exploring heartbreak, and the awkward dance between exes from the positionality of an Ilnu and Québécoise woman whose poetic 'gasoline-soaked heart' yearns deeply for love. Translated by Kristen Renee Miller from French into English, Gill's Heating the Outdoors re-wilds the ritualistic humdrum of domestic life while honouring the land and her 'crème-soda ancestral spirit.'" —Shannon Webb-Campbell, author of Lunar Tides and I Am a Body of Land
"These poems live in a bachelor apartment over the corner store. They're on the bus looking out at the muddy hangtime between winter and spring, in a too-warm jacket. These poems will make you a cup of tar-coffee and tell you about the ache of desire in the language of crunching snow. You'll come back to them over and over again to listen." —Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings
“Marie-Andrée Gill’s spare, luminous micropoems are endlessly surprising, twisting out, into, and unto themselves like complicated lovers. Defiantly fragmentary, these are stunning shards of tongues, embodied vernaculars slowly, steadily unsettling grammars. Kristen Renee Miller’s translations retain the elegance and shimmer of the originals while wondrously conveying their knottedness, their syntax of skin. When at last we reach Nitassinan, we are reminded of the worlds poetry documents, but also of the worlds it creates. This is poetry that claims the power to 'gnaw the meat off each day and spit out the pin bones' through a language as unresolved as our decolonial dreams and as necessary as our sovereign desires.” —Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal
Additional Information
98 pages | 5.25" x 7.75" | Paperback
Spawn
$18.00
Format:
Paperback
Text Content Territories:
Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi); Mashteuiatsh (Pekuakamiulnuatsh);
Grade Levels: 12; University/College;
ISBN / Barcode: 9781771665971
Synopsis:
Synopsis:
Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andrée Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?
The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"—her voice and her identity.
Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself".
Reviews
"Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness. Here, poems summon a spawn of wonderworking dreams: 'a woman risen up from all these winter worlds, heaped with ice [and] ready to start again'." —Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
"Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
"Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving 'the chalky veins' of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle." —Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood
Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2020/2021 resource list for grade 12 for English Language Arts and Social Justice.
Caution: Some foul language, sexual and violent content.
Additional Information
96 pages | 5.25" x 7.75" | Translated by Kristen Renee Miller
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