Creeland

Synopsis:

Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing—or at least attempting to.

The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them. Hunt gestures to the movements, speech acts and relations that exceed available vocabularies, that may be housed within words like joy, but which the words themselves cannot fully convey. This debut collection is vital in the context of a colonial aesthetic designed to perpetually foreclose on Indigenous futures and erase Indigenous existence.

the Cree word for constellation

is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime

the translation for policeman

in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs

the translation for genius

in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep

the Cree word for poetry is your four-year-old

niece’s cracked lips spilling out

broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin in between

the gaps in her teeth 

Reviews
"Here is an ode to northern Alberta, to the kokums and aunties who are worlds unto themselves, to the vastness and profundity of the Cree language. Dallas Hunt’s Creeland is tender and aching and intellectually exciting. Hunt uses the lyric mode to write another kind of public history about the prairies, one in which we Cree are always beautiful and indomitable. I can’t thank him enough for this." — Billy-Ray Belcourt, February 2021

"Dallas Hunt’s debut collection of poetry is work built from the ground up, meaning he has read, loved, studied poetry. He uses language “lived” in his relationships with family, home, community. Creeland feels like home to me. It “[crackles] with love and life.”" — Marilyn Dumont, February 2021

"From index to glossary, this stunning work bends with the possibilities of saplings. Mortally aware, a mind that can be everywhere “wolf willows and pin / cherries,” here is a poet halting the mallets of supremacy. Dallas Hunt aligns “petals of / larkspur” against the “maw of the inferno” to speak of Creeland. Entwined in “pîsim’s luminous / touch,” the poet’s smile returns home. Bringing forth fine, wry and tenderizing poetry, rickety love begets gale winds, and everyday, constellatory magnitudes. A quieting read with dimensional perspective, this book will transport you." — Cecily Nicholson, February 2021

Additional Information
128 pages | 5.50" x 8.00"