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Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Only the Scent of You Remained
$24.95
Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781998779871

Synopsis:

Duncan Mercredi was Winnipeg's Poet Laureate in 2021. In this frank, raw, and honest collection the poet chases down the river of who he is. Each bend, each stone, every waterfall, a sharing of self. Then the writings can be rolled up and when the time comes, the time that he leaves the place he calls home, they will be placed on the sacred fire. To return to where they came from. You are invited to walk with the author during intimate reflection and pause to remember the people who have been a part of his life and journey, the ones who influenced him, both good and bad. The paths taken, the roads travelled that led him to this city. As the wick burns the last of its wax we recognize its existence as the scent of smoke still remains long after the light goes out.

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Something for the Dark
$19.95
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Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Cree (Nehiyawak);
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781779400888

Synopsis:

Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.

Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.

As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.

Reviews
“Such longing! ‘These days I wrestle no angels. I wrestle / with words. And no one is saved.’ writes Randy Lundy. In Something for the Dark, he presents tâpwêwina—truths drawn from the hand dealt and the life lived. ‘Nothing is hidden,’ he suggests, if we take the time to observe from a distance and wait in silence.” — Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.51" x 8.50" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
I Would Like to Say Thank You
$19.95
Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9780889714908

Synopsis:

New poems from award-winning storyteller and poet Joseph Dandurand.

Prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand offers his latest poetry collection, following The Punishment and The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Building on his legacy as a skilled storyteller, Dandurand continues to write about trauma, love, grief and forgiveness. These poems are about the streets, the East Side, self-pity, spirits and Dandurand’s people, the Kwantlen. As the jury of the 2022 Latner Writers’ Trust Award wrote, “his quotidian reflections read like parables, with startling economy.” After putting this collection down, don’t be surprised to find yourself saying “thank you,” too.

Additional Information
102 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Beaver Hills Forever: A Metis Poetic Novella
$21.95
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Métis;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781834050089

Synopsis:

An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life

Conor Kerr's 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada's colonial education system and resource extraction industries.

A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.

An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life

Conor Kerr's 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada's colonial education system and resource extraction industries.

A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.

Reviews
"Not every Metis kid / Needs a sad story," says a character in Conor Kerr's propulsive and deeply entertaining new work, where each bone-clean sentence holds a galaxy of stories in its marrow. Kerr is part of a vital contemporary movement that is reimagining what our literatures can be and what they can do. Beaver Hills Forever is a reminder that laughter and passion are as much a part of the narrative as struggle. In these pages, you'll find voices that demand to be heard, felt, and remembered." — Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman and Bad Endings

"Much like his prose, Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever imbues the language of everyday Indigenous life with a poetic charm that is just incredibly readable and relatable. This book is truly multitudinous: a love story, an anti-love story, a critique of neoliberalism, an ode to the Prairies, and, above all, proof that even our smallest desires are worthy of sustained poetic consideration." — Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of Coexistence

"Beaver Hills Forever is full of raunch and riot. Conor Kerr's ability to gravitate around the embodied truths of institutional whiteness, class, settler colonization, and the Indigenous (Metis) experience in the moraine of amiskwaciy is rebellious in its desire to not pathologize or rationalize the violent backdrops of its animate setting. With his skilled hand, Kerr makes sure there is "room for [all] in the digital economy of the Future." — Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

"Aho, fancy reader! Welcome to Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever. We'll laugh, we'll cry. We'll smoke, we'll die. Etc, etc. Beaver Hills Forever is funny, heartfelt, poetic, badass. It's Bald Boy, Goodbye, Sad Story, Indigenous Canon. Etc, etc. Magpie cackles, Metis literatures, Aunty Prof wonders, realizes, smudges, feel-good energy. Fuck all the ongoing bullshit internal politics and academic distortion and just hear the truth, etc, etc." — Jordan Abel, author of Empty Spaces and NISHGA

Additional Information
88 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

 

 

Authentic Indigenous Text
A Bow Forged from Ash
$21.95
Format: Paperback
ISBN / Barcode: 9781997508038

Synopsis:

A Bow Forged from Ash is a journey of Indigenous reclamation. In poems that explore identity, belonging, responsibility and wholeness, Melissa Powless Day navigates her ties to the landscapes of Southwestern Ontario and the nations to which she belongs. Traversing lived experience, ancestral memory, family stories, and critical engagements with the Land, Powless Day pulls back the bow of language: her poems are poised, unyielding in their nanda-gikendang, their seeking, to voice complex stories about the messiness of returning home, a restoration of familial and community bonds generations in the making. Ultimately, A Bow Forged from Ash is a book that proves reclamation and resistance are inseparable: one cannot walk with pride in their Indigeneity without choosing to resist the colonial status quo.

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

Authentic Indigenous Text
Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms
$29.50
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous American; Native American;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9798890920300

Synopsis:

From adventures in Indigenous futurism to tales of first love, the stories and poems of Beyond the Glittering World proclaim and celebrate a rising generation of Native American storytellers.

Beyond the Glittering World brings together twenty emerging and established Native women writers and writers of marginalized genders, including Moniquill Blackgoose, Heid E. Erdrich, A.J. Eversole, Chelesa Hicks, and D. Daye Hunter. Immersing readers in worlds as varied as their authors, this collection presents an array of singular voices at their genre-bending, boundary-breaking, devastating, and joyous best.

Reviews
"An evocative compilation of voices pondering Indigenous futures and the shape of Indigenous love. Beyond the Glittering World holds a healthy dose of gender-bending, genre-challenging, future-hoping might. This anthology is a welcome addition to the field of Indigenous anthologies.”—DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA, Whiskey Tender

Additional Information
240 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human
$39.95
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Editors:
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Métis;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781487551889

Synopsis:

Emma LaRocque was born in 1949 in Lac La Biche into a Cree-speaking Métis family. She grew up in a one-room, kerosene-lit log cabin built by her father. At the age of nine, she fought her parents to attend school, where she encountered English and the colonizer’s harmful stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. Confronting the contradictions of colonialism sparked her journey as a writer and scholar, as she sought to understand the dissonance between her identity and the world around her.

The Emma LaRocque Reader is a comprehensive collection of her most significant writings, poetry and prose, offering an intimate window into the mind of one of Canada’s foremost Indigenous scholars. Through her work, LaRocque provides profound insights into the intersections of colonialism, sexism, and racism in Canada, while also critically celebrating the beauty of her community and culture. In the afterword, she reflects on fifty years of challenging the colonial enterprise. A vital contribution to postcolonial literature, The Emma LaRocque Reader intertwines the personal and the political to explore what it means to be human, offering a powerful testament to Indigenous resistance, resilience, and vision.

This collection brings together the works of Métis scholar Emma LaRocque, offering a half-century of her poetry and prose, and shedding new light on Canada, colonialism, and Indigenous resistance.

Educator Information
Chapters
Foreword by Armand Ruffo
Preface by Elaine Coburn
Acknowledgments by Emma LaRocque
Acknowledgments of Permissions to Reprint
Introduction by Elaine Coburn
1975 A Personal Essay on Poverty (Excerpt from Defeathering the Indian)
1983 The Métis in English Canadian Literature
1988 On the Ethics of Publishing Historical Documents
1989 Racism Runs through Canadian Society
1990 Preface: Here Are Our Voices: Who Will Hear?
1990 Geese (poem)
1990 Nostalgia (poem)
1990 “Progress” (poem)
1990 The Red in Winter (poem)
1990 Incongruence (poem)
1990 Loneliness (poem)
1990 Beggar (poem)
1990 Tides, Towns, and Trains
1992 My Hometown, Northern Canada, South Africa (poem)
1993 Violence in Aboriginal Communities
1994 Long Way from Home (poem)
1996 The Colonization of a Native Woman Scholar
1996 When the Other Is Me: Native Writers Confronting Canadian Literature
2001 Native Identity and the Métis: Otehpayimsuak Peoples
2001 From the Land to the Classroom
2004 When the Wild West Is Me
2006 Sweeping (poem)
2006 Sources of Inspiration: The Birth of "For the Love of Words": Aboriginal Writers of Canada
2007 Métis and Feminist
2009 Reflections on Cultural Continuity through Aboriginal Women’s Writings
2010 Native Writers Reconstruct: Pushing Paradigms
2013 For the Love of Place – Not Just Any Place: Selected Métis Writings
2015 “Resist No Longer”: Reflections on Resistance Writing and Teaching
2016 Contemporary Métis Literature: Resistance, Roots, Innovation
2016 Colonialism Lived
2017 Powerlines (poem)
2022 Wehsakehcha, Comics, Shakespeare, and the Dictionary
2023 Afterword
Index

Additional Information
348 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems
$25.00
Format: Hardcover
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9780771014017

Synopsis:

Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.

In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes slyly humorous, are always finely crafted, putting to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of grief and awe.

Reviews
"To read Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of An Enitre Life is to experience genre as a place between landscapes, but also beyond them: horizon as 'line break,' infrastructure as 'wound,' 'an image of a forest someone else/was supposed to know by heart.' These poems are achingly beautiful. Belcourt writes what’s already broken, breaking in real-time, 'in order to repair it.' How this new form might arrive, 'miraculously' but also diligently, an act of recuperation and courage that’s on-going, 'meandering' but also (always) 'incomplete,' becomes what happens when we read."—Bhanu Kapil

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Hardcover 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
procession
$22.99
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Métis;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781487013523

Synopsis:

you are only here

to learn from those who came before

and make space

for those who come after

Procession: a line of people moving in the same direction; a formal ceremony or celebration, as in a wedding, a funeral, a religious parade. Bestseller and Governor General's Award-winner katherena vermette's third collection presents a series of poems reaching into what it means to be at once a descendant and a future ancestor, exploring the connections we have with one another and ourselves, amongst friends, and within families and Nations.

In frank, heartfelt poems that move through body sovereignty and ancestral dreams, and from '80s childhood nostalgia to welcoming one's own babies, vermette unreels the story of a child, a parent, and soon, an elder, living in a prairie place that has always existed, though looks much different to her now. This book is about being one small part of a large genealogy. A lineage is a line, and the procession, whether in celebration or in mourning, is ongoing. procession delves into what it means to make poems and to be an artist, to be born into a body, to carry it all, and, if you're very lucky, age.

be a good ancestor

be a good kid

Reviews
"The poems in procession are remarkable: spare but generous, both grounded and skillfully drawn. With her signature musicality, insight, and wit, vermette reminds us that we - like our bodies and the earth, like our histories and our shared, threatened future - are essentially, impossibly intertwined." -Chimwemwe Undi, Governor General's Award-winning author of Scientific Marvel?

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
What Shade of Brown
$20.00
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Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781998926282

Synopsis:

Passionate poetry and prose exploring the experience of an Indigenous person who feels like a stranger in a strange land, not quite accepted because of his light skin but also undermined by a settler-colonial society. Lyrical and heartfelt, bewildered and shaken, the poet struggles to find a connection to his family and lost culture.

Additional Information
75 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Cloud Missives
$22.95
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Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781959030607

Synopsis:

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.

Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.

Reviews
"Cloud Missives is a promise, to the reader, the speaker, the poet, and every generation before and to come. A promise not just of what to expect from Allen’s career, but a promise that the future will look back on this collection, and the time in which it was written—hopefully—with as much skillful attention as Allen has"— Chicago Review of Books

"A master of poetic attention. . . . a collection worthy of the clouds."— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Filled with poems as restless as they are carefully wrought."— The Rumpus

"Incredible. . . . evocative. . . . Kenzie Allen's first volume of poetry is a stunning consideration of constructing identity, finding love, and living life."— Shelf Awareness

"In rejecting the borders previously observed by cartoonish portraits of Indigenous peoples, Allen makes room for the love song... . .Within Cloud Missives, each poem is necessary…. Each a lyric towards a more possible future."— On the Seawall

"Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives renders an unchartable landscape, 'wide as a child’s face,' in poems that enact Indigenous autoethnography and a profoundly embodied recovery operation. These are poems of revelation and repair, twenty-first-century poems that extend the work of the lyric into the territory of 'elegy against elegy,' love songs written to drive out violence and exoticization masked as love, and poems that wake to the desire to awaken. Along the way, there is exhumation in all its forms, of pop culture signifiers, from Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily to Indiana Jones, and revivified archetypes, from the ghost of the British Empire to the Evil Queen, harpy, fanged siren. Most crucial is the disinterment of personal scars and the violence they represent, and ancestral bones, 'piled, piled, / piled; piled; PILED; PILED, / nameless, done in, / piled—piled—piled,' each twisted foot and chipped skull a clue to an origin story and 'a keyhole to let angels in,' and the indefatigable voice out. Allen has written a masterwork of self-reclamation and survival through love."— Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

"With archeological care, Allen begins a poetic and meticulous examination of the layers of life. Often surprising, these poems 'know violence / like it made me—rage / like it rocked me to sleep.' Intensely scrutinized events that involve Native women are separated into strata to reveal a powerful self and a voice that seems to have been waiting beneath the pressure of years to, at long last, speak."— Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully

"This incredible debut announces Kenzie Allen as an important voice in Native literature. Through impeccable craft, she explores themes of health and healing, Indigenous genealogy and identity, kinship and love. These poems are a ‘song against the song of our demise.’ May their missives travel far and wide; may their words bloom like sweetgrass."— Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory

Additional Information
128 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Authentic Indigenous Text
Siren of Atlantis
$33.95
Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9798891060135

Synopsis:

Cedar Sigo's latest poetry collection, Siren of Atlantis, is an introspective odyssey of remarkable poetic and personal resonance.

Here are poems that speak to Sigo's profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well.

Additional Information
80 pages | 7.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Re: Wild Her
$22.95
Quantity:
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Mi'kmaq (Mi'gmaq);
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781771669337

Synopsis:

In nature, rewilding restores biodiversity and ecosystems. In this new collection from award-winning poet Shannon Webb-Campbell, it is a form of Indigenous resurgence and pleasure.

Drawing upon ecology, traditional knowledge, and sexuality, Re: Wild Her is a personal and poetic awakening. In these pages artistry and nature are intertwined, speaking to the sensual musings of lovers in Paris, driftwood and death cycles, and the rise of wild swimming and cold dipping. Throughout, reclaiming one’s divine femininity is celebrated as a powerful act of resistance and rejuvenation.

These “poem spells” each offer a different prism with which to rewild ourselves, answering the call: How does joy help us cope with the harsh realities and complexities of life? How does poetry help us move forward? Re: Wild Her is an invitation to catapult into the otherworldly, to dive with the muses, and to resubmerge ourselves in joy.

Reviews
“Shannon Webb-Campbell's nomad-like grazing on the treasures and pleasures of the world is sensuous, hungry, restless; the throat of this poet is wide open, expectant. In swallowing life and earth's marvels, she herself becomes them, and encourages the same of her reader.” —Shani Mootoo, author of Oh Witness Dey!

“These poems are wanderers, boldly straying across the globe (France, Cypress, Mexico, Cuba, California, Newfoundland) and in and out of the past, unafraid of 'strange creature sightings'—seeking them, in fact. They are poems hungry for magic and eager for transport, harkening to Elders and Buddhists, astrology and transatlantic flights, Two-Eyed Seeing and tarot. The transport sought isn’t the sort that offers escape from the world but one that pushes past the dominance of Enlightenment-style reason and opens a person up to mutuality and wonder.” —Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems

Additional Information
112 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | Paperback 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Commonwealth
$19.00
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Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781928120483

Synopsis:

Commonwealth is a profound lyrical meditation on the pre- and post-colonial migrations of the Lenape population throughout the American Midwest, from the watershed of Weli Sipu (the Ohio River) in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to Indiana and beyond. This is a book that transcribes the languages of rivers, highways, rail lines, and buffalo traces. It seeks—or is pushed toward—destinations that are always over the horizon. It is about the fluidity of space and time, and the tangibility of history. As the Lenape journey ever northward and westward, they both create and are created by a collective body of stories: stories of belonging and exclusion, of freedom and confinement, of aspirations and hard truths. Commonwealth explores the ways landscape and people inform one another, and does so in a way that is as clear as a broad Ohio sky.

Additional Information
116 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
All Wrong Horses on Fire That Go Away in the Rain
$20.95
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Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781774391143

Synopsis:

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.

Reviews
“Sarain Frank Soonias introduces us to himself and his craft with this strong, stunning debut. Language woven together with skillful storytelling and metaphor reminds us that our people will always create beautiful art, even in what feels like an abyss. This book is about the responsibility we have to heal ourselves while collectively working for a better world for future generations.” — Emily Riddle, award-winning author of The Big Melt

Additional Information
132 pages | 9.00" x 5.50" | Paperback 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine
$27.00
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Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781773637259

Synopsis:

A journalistic poetry collection reflecting on Palestinian and Indigenous solidarities, genocides, life, and liberation.

In October 2023, upon witnessing the escalation of Palestinian genocide, Ktunaxa poet Smokii Sumac began writing poems reflecting on the stories of Palestinians in Gaza who were risking their lives to share news of the genocide of Palestinian culture, literature, and life. These 100 poems offer a witnessing of the escalation of colonial violence, both current and historical, across oceans, lands, cultures, and people, and the reckoning one has in the face of a genocide.

Vulnerable, eloquent, compassionate, and enduring, Born Sacred is an in-time reflection honouring the shared histories of Indigenous Peoples of North America and of the people in Palestine. Sumac offers this collection as a small piece of life dedicated to Palestinians and resounds the collective call for solidarity in our shared liberation.

Reviews
"Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine is a profound work of grace and solidarity, rooted in a hard-earned understanding of colonialism’s insatiable appetite. What Smokii Sumac has done, over the course of 100 searing, open-hearted poems, is give voice to the immeasurable grief of bearing witness to genocide – the overwhelming magnitude of it, colliding with a knowledge that this has happened before, that there is an age-old methodology to the act of endless taking. I am so grateful for this work, for this beautiful, honest reminder that, whatever power empires wield, we have what it can never take. We have one another."— Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

"The succinct starkness of Smokii Sumac’s offerings are an X-Ray to the grief and absurdity of our times. This dangerous dichotomy of trying to live one’s everyday life while holding the tragedy of everyday loss is profoundly captured in each stanza."— Catherine Hernandez, author and screenwriter of Scarborough

"This collection is the antidote to the silence and cowardice of millions, and the medicine for those who watched the first recorded genocide unfold and needed to be seen and witnessed. Creating room for collective grief, Smokii Sumac shows us the responsibility and power of the poet to face the blank page in the here and now and the necessity for words to remain as a testimony to history. Born Sacred is an essential work in the fight for collective liberation and a reminder that hope can be rooted in allyship." — Rayya Liebich, author of Min Hayati

"I am always drawn to the constellational consciousness that permeates so many Asian refugee, Indigenous, and Black literary and cultural works. This constellational consciousness, the culturally-informed relational view of life and solidarity in struggle, is vital in Smokii Sumac’s collection. In both form and content, the poems shatter dominating linear and compartmentalizing interpretations of the world with constellating stanzas, voices, and experiences that reveal the intertwined histories and presents of colonial harm and Indigenous survivance."— Maral Aguilera-Moradipour, assistant professor, Asian refugee literatures and cultures, SFU

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Authentic Indigenous Text
Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief
$24.95
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Format: Hardcover
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781984861368

Synopsis:

A beautifully illustrated edition of Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s poem “Washing My Mother’s Body,” which offers a way through grief when the loss appears unbearable.

As I wash my mother’s face, I tell her
how beautiful she is, how brave, how her beauty and bravery
live on in her grandchildren. Her face is relaxed, peaceful.
Her earth memory body has not left yet,
but when I see her the next day, embalmed and in the casket
in the funeral home, it will be gone.
Where does it go?

Through lyrical prose and evocative watercolor illustrations by award-winning Muscogee artist Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother’s Body explores the complexity of a daughter’s grief as she reflects on the joys and sorrows of her mother’s life. She lays her mother to rest in the landscape of her memory, honoring the hands that raised her, the body that protected her, and the legs that carried her mother through adversity.

Moving, comforting, and deeply emotional, Washing My Mother’s Body is a tender look at mother-daughter relationships, the complexity of grieving the loss of a parent, and the enduring love of those left behind.

Additional Information
80 pages | 5.79" x 7.81" | Hardcover 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Mother, Can I Say It Now?
$19.95
Quantity:
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781772312447

Synopsis:

Mother, Can I Say it Now? is a compelling collection of poems that delve into the beauty and depth of Indigenous poetry. It reflects the essence of everyday life and captures the spirit of belonging. The poems in this collection explore themes of identity, culture, and connection to the land. They offer a unique perspective that resonates with readers from all walks of life. From The Next Pretend-Indian to Things Abandoned in the Night, each poem tells a story that is both compelling and thought-provoking. These captivating verses are a tribute to the resilience and creativity of Indigenous voices.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Modern Indigenous Voices series.

Additional Information
88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
High Noon Neptune
$19.95
Quantity:
Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781772312225

Synopsis:

High Noon Neptune is a powerful poetry collection that delves into important issues of loss, love, class, and capitalism. Throughout this book, the reader is taken on a journey of survival, where the intersections of identity and oppression are explored with clarity and reverence. The poems shed light on the complexities of living in a society that is rife with discrimination and inequality, and the battles that individuals face to survive within these intersecting systems. This book fearlessly navigates through societal and personal struggles with a sharp wit and bold defiance. With each poem, David Groulx confronts and challenges the societal norms and structures that perpetuate injustice and inequality. High Noon Neptune offers a raw and unapologetic perspective on the realities of navigating life as a marginalized individual. This poetry collection is a powerful testament to the resilience and strength of those who refuse to be silenced and continue to fight for survival.

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This book is part of the Modern Indigenous Voices series.

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88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

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Rangikura: Poems
$37.99
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780593534625

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A fiery second collection of poetry from the acclaimed Indigenous New Zealand writer that U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo calls, “One of the most startling and original poets of her generation.”

Tayi Tibble returns on the heels of her incendiary debut with a bold new follow-up. Barbed and erotic, vulnerable and searching, Rangikura asks readers to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. Moving between hotel lobbies and all-night clubs, these poems chronicle life spent in spaces that are stalked by transaction and reward. “I grew up tacky and hungry and dazzling,” Tibble writes. “Mum you should have tied me/to the ground./Instead I was given/to this city freely.”

Here is a poet staking out a sense of freedom on her own terms in times that very often feel like end times. Tibble’s range of forms and sounds are dazzling. Written with Māori moteatea, purakau, and karakia (chants, legends, and prayers) in mind, Rangikura explores the way the past comes back, even when she tries to turn her back on it. “I was forced to remember that,/wherever I go,/even if I go nowhere at all,/I am still a descendent of mountains.”

At once a coming-of-age and an elegy to the traumas born from colonization, especially the violence enacted against indigenous women, Rangikura interrogates not only the poets’ pain, but also that of her ancestors. The intimacy of these poems will move readers to laughter and tears. Speaking to herself, sometimes to the reader, these poems arc away from and return to their ancestral roots to imagine the end of the world and a new day. They invite us into the swirl of nostalgia and exhaustion produced in the pursuit of an endless summer. (“My heart goes out like an abandoned swan boat/ghosting along a lake”). They are a new highpoint from a writer of endless talent. 

Reviews
"When Tayi Tibble was eight, she decided she’d be a writer...Despite a slew of accomplishment at just 28—including, but not limited to, being the first Māori writer published in The New Yorker and an appearance in in Lorde’s Solar Power music video—she remains miraculously humble....Rangikura, her incendiary second collection, hits bookshelves this week in the States...[In it] Tibble nimbly zig zags from comedic lines about the Kardashians to reflections on ancestral trauma, colonization and love affairs." —Eloise King-Clements, Interview Magazine

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96 pages | 6.19" x 8.66" | Hardcover 

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Songs From the Asylum
$19.95
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Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781772312379

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For over twenty years, Nehiyawak-Metis artist and author John Brady McDonald’s day job has been working with youth. Over half of that time was spent as a Frontline Youth Outreach Worker on the streets of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. During that time, John would write down his thoughts and feelings on scraps of paper and in little black hardcover notebooks, chronicling the struggles and traumas of the youth he worked with and which he himself had also experienced. Never being quite the right fit for his other poetry books, John took these poems and hid them away for years, until now. Recently rediscovered in his archives, John has compiled them, using a 54-year-old typewriter, into a work which gives voice to the experiences and resilience of those youth, along with his own experiences, thoughts and recollections of a poet in the midst of a turbulent moment in time amongst the concrete and asphalt of the city.

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This book is part of the Modern Indigenous Voices series.

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88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

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Homecoming
$19.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781772312485

Synopsis:

Homecoming is a poetry collection that reflects our human journey as we grow and learn, and author’s personal journey through childhood, marriage, divorce, parenthood, and parents’ old age, as well as the author’s quest to reclaim and celebrate her Native heritage. The poems in Homecoming are grouped according to the four directions of the Medicine Wheel: East for Beginnings, South for Innocence, West for Going Within, North for Elder and Wisdom, plus three poems for the Centre, the Great Mystery.

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This book is part of the Modern Indigenous Voices series.

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88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback 

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Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert
$21.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780816554300

Synopsis:

Blue Corn Tongue is a like mixtape from a thirty-something Diné punk girl. It offers poetry about love, friendship, environmental destruction, and language loss.

Reviews
“This collection describes a life woven together through the topography of the land examining elements of language, love, and family. There is a distinct point of view that encompasses the dialectical nature of belonging. Traveling alongside the poet in tender and sometimes funny moments, I found myself wanting to share these poems with friends.”—Naomi Ortiz, author of Rituals for Climate Change

“McCrary’s collection is one that only she could write. It is a mixtape from a thirty-something Diné punk girl with tracks about love and friendship, but also environmental destruction and language loss.”—Casandra López, author of Brother Bullet

Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert is a wonder of a book full of ‘Weaving words with nostalgic tongues, heirloom futures and circular knowledge.’ Multilingual, expansive, and courageously written, these poems are an ecosystem of love and place that moves the reader through a sensory landscape of frank emotion and complex beauty. Lovers ‘maized through the rooms’ of a boarding school exhibit ‘familiar as grandma’s tortillas ‘in one poem and inhabit a space where ‘desert honey pulsates’ in another. Both strikingly original and deeply rooted, this book is a marvel to behold.”—Laura Da’, author of Instruments of the True Measure

“In the middle of the desert, a woman holds a poem. And a river begins to flow. McCray’s stunning poems tell the story of the seed, the root, and the inevitable flower. Anchored in the question ‘How does language open?’ this experimental, brave, and intimate book is a must-read.”—Margarita Pintado Burgos, author of Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat

“Equal parts tender and defiant, McCrary’s Blue Corn Tongue laps up landscape and love alike. Propelled by a moving sensuousness, this collection reframes relations between poet, lover, relatives, and the history binding them. Through striking visuals, rich carnality, and the occasional unexpected laugh, McCrary’s work celebrates and challenges what it means to dream and desire from within O’odham Jeweḍ and Dinétah.”—Oscar Mancinas, author of To Live and Die in El Valle

“Amber McCrary is a poet of generational talent who has written a masterful work of staggering beauty. One cannot help but read and reread Blue Corn Tongue with a sense of awe and gratitude for having witnessed, for having been gifted with a poetry that does the important work of documenting and honoring the narratives of her rich culture. I am holding something important in my hands, in this time. I am going to be holding this book close to the heart for years to come because it means that much to me.”—Truong Tran, author of Book of the Other

“In Amber McCrary’s poems, the deserts are rich with sweet honey. This sumptuous debut celebrates Indigenous love, the Navajo language, corn kernels grinding on the tongue—lush life upon life. Blue Corn Tongue teaches me to indulge in intimacy, to find it essential, even as it is haunted by loss. I am thankful for this collection, which insists on remaining abundant and unashamed.”—Erin Marie Lynch, author of Removal Acts

"Filled with stylistically innovative poems that embody place and emerge from ‘the mouth of deserts,’ Blue Corn Tongue carries both ‘generational grief’ and reclamation. McCrary’s poetry claims the Diné language and a vibrant matrilineal power through a ‘kin kind of tongue.’ These intimate poems are filled with lush, tactile images and populated with beings and beliefs that have survived colonization. Over and over, they celebrate ‘something laws cannot govern.’”—Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light and Wisconsin poet laureate, 2015–16

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96 pages | 7.00" x 9.00" | 4 Maps | Paperback 

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Seeds are for Sharing: Reclaiming Spirit
$20.99
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781778540592

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"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.

In this genre-defying blend of poetry and story, Ojibway and Mohawk Elder Dawn Smoke shares all that lives within her heart, mind, and soul. As a young girl confronted with the anger and pain of being scooped from her birth family, Dawn bravely discovers her truth and a path towards healing. She is unwavering in her honesty, a protector of Mother Earth, and a fierce advocate against the oppression of Indigenous people.

Reclaiming what was taken is not an easy feat, yet in doing so, Dawn illuminates the Spirit all around us. This striking memoir, told in spoken word, speaks to the devastating realities of colonization and radiates with the resilience found within culture and community.

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120 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback 

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Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells: Part 1: Scraping Lungs Like Hide
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780889714601

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In their second poetry collection, Tawahum Bige explores belonging and voice of a Two-Spirit Dene youth.

These poems are a stark plunge—an answer to how voice emerges for a young Two Spirit growing up in so-called “Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutselk'e Dene territories. The fundamental thrum in which vocal cords produce sound to whisper, cry, holler and laugh—these inner workings are made corporeal through moments of growth from childhood to young adulthood to show how the seeds sprouted for someone who needed to learn to express to find their path.

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96 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | 25 colour and b&w photographs | Paperback 

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Poukahangatus: Poems
$24.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780593467893

Synopsis:

An acclaimed young poet explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.

Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies—Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi—peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions (“The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard”). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings.

These are warm, provocative, and profoundly original poems, written by a woman for whom diving into the wreck means taking on new assumptions—namely, that it is not radical to write from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work, and gender are obviously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and how she as a Māori woman fits into trends, stereotypes, and popular culture. With language that is at once colorful, passionate, and laugh-out-loud funny, Poūkahangatus is the work of one of our most daring new poets.

Reviews
“This chatty, winsome debut by a young New Zealand poet mines family history, Maori myth and the residue of pop culture to fashion a striking sensibility.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Tibble writes wittily of the hunger games of adolescence. . . . However lost their youthful personas, these wise poems know exactly where they are heading.”—David Wheatley, The Guardian

“Tibble’s smart, sexy, slang-studded verse is fanciful and dramatic, reveling in the pains and the pleasures of contemporary young womanhood yet undergirded by an acute sense of history. Her voice remains sure-footed across many registers, and the book, at its best, functions as an atlas for learning to explore the world on one’s own terms.”—The New Yorker

“In Tibble’s seismic debut, the young poet’s rollicking, indignant, and invigorating narratives contend with history and navigate what it means to be millennial, female, and of Māori descent. Tibble stares unblinkingly at bigotry, her ferocity consuming the male, white, evangelical gaze she encounters. . . . Tibble’s kinetic use of language makes this an exciting and memorable debut.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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96 pages | 5.85" x 8.34" | Paperback 

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Liturgy of Savage No. 82
$20.00
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781773860664

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Originally from the community of Ekuanitshit (Mingan) in the Lower North Shore region of Quebec, Cousineau-Mollen was adopted at a very young age by an urban family as part of what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. Although Cousineau-Mollen did not grow up in an Indigenous community, her adoptive family maintained contact with her biological family, ensuring she remained connected to her culture and identity. Having faced adversity and rejection during her studies at Laval University due to her Indian Status, she has since worked to build and support community initiatives, through Aboriginal student associations and involvement in the Wolf Pack Street Patrol, for the Indigenous homeless people of Montreal. In The Liturgy of Savage No. 82, Cousineau-Mollen reclaims, honours, and makes space for herself and the rights of Indigenous women. A powerful and emotional poetry collection, The Liturgy of Savage No. 82 explores the realities facing Indigenous women in Canada and the emotional impact of homelessness, intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, all through a feminist lens as she considers the implications of femininity and identity in relation to the unceded land of her people.

Reviews
“Cousineau-Mollen’s poetry embodies resilience, and how the impact of colonization has affected Indigenous peoples, and First Nation women in particular.”—Shannon Webb-Campbell, Muskrat Magazine on Bréviaire du matricule 082 (Éditions Hannenorak, 2019)

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72 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback 

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a body more tolerable
$19.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781551529677

Synopsis:

Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view

a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.

In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.

Reviews
"jaye simpson's a body more tolerable is a singular achievement. Her poetic project, at once forward-dawning and ancestral, both revolutionary and decolonizing, is given total expression in this book. These poems moved me immensely; there is so much beauty and feeling power in all of them. No one is writing like jaye simpson." -Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus and Coexistenc

"a body more tolerable is a work at once open and lyric, fearless and tender. Expanding grief's territory into moments of relation and desire, simpson also challenges "home, as a wayward theory" into a poetics of self-mothering, of being beyond becoming. This collection is a fierce and resistant nurturing." -Liz Howard, author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent and Letters in a Bruised Cosmo

"jaye simpson is one of the most compelling and incisive voices of their generation. In a body more tolerable, they seize the English language and command it into an instrument that meticulously sings the realities of their present moment. I found solace, fire, and a relentless love for living and loving in these poetic offerings. a body more tolerable is a wayward map, and it is gorgeous. I'll carry it close to my heart." -Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

"i can't retire this tongue," jaye simpson writes in a sophomore collection that creeps, howls, floats, shatters. an Indigenous speaker grapples with survival, the foster care system, the body, conceptions of motherhood, and trans girlhood in this heart-wrenching leap that returns what is most precious to us through lush language and keen lyricism. each poem is a portal of longing, ferocity, softness. i can't recommend it enough." -Kinsale Drake, National Poetry Series-winning author of The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

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88 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | Paperback 

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South Side of a Kinless River
$23.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781771316316

Synopsis:

A nuanced, relational, and community-minded new book from one of Canada's preeminent poets.

South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities figure into these poems. They add up to a Métis woman's prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.

Reviews
"Each poem is an anthem, every page showcasing the talent and necessity of this incredible poetic voice. Dumont brings the Métis tone, cadence and intricate stitch-work into all she creates." - Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves and Empire of the Wild

"The voice of this Métis woman is as loving, tender and humane, as it is powerful, satirical and political..."- Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion

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80 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback 

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Island
$22.00
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Mi'kmaq (Mi'gmaq);
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781773103396

Synopsis:

“Canada rejected our applications for enrolment in the Qalipu First Nation. Initially, I was relieved by the rejection. I’d watched my hometown divide itself — are you Mi′kmaq or settler? Mi′kmaq or not Mi′kmaq enough?”

Centred around the Newfoundland Mi'kmaq experience in the wake of the controversial Qalipu First Nation enrolment process, Island wades through the fracture and mistrust that continues to linger in many communities. In this new collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough expands upon issues of identity and history that he introduced in Crow Gulch, offering a deeply personal and equally beautiful exploration of Mi'kmaw and Newfoundland identity.

Walbourne-Gough’s narrative poems trace the formation of identity, not through status documentation, but through its deeper roots in childhood memories, family, spirituality, and dreams. Throughout this collection, he approaches life in fragments — snuggling into his nan’s sealskin snowsuit, learning Mi'kmaq from an app, or the myriad of complex emotions that come with receiving a status card — and watches them transform into pieces of an everlasting puzzle. Island reckons with an often-ignored, yet persistent, effect of colonialism — fractured identities.

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80 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

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She Falls Again
$23.95
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Cree (Nehiyawak);
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781552454879

Synopsis:

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.

Awards

  • 2025 Indigenous Voices Awards - Poetry in English Award

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96 pages | 5.00" x 8.00" | Paperback

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North of Middle Island
$17.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781928120377

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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.

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93 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

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The Flesh of Ice
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781773861579

Synopsis:

The Secwépemc term le estcwicwéy̓ (the missing) was given by Secwépemc elders who dedicated their knowledge and time to guide the community through the hell they were forced to endure in May 2021. Garry Gottfriedson’s The Flesh of Ice picks up the thread of his 2021 collection, Bent Back Tongue, describing the history and relationship of Indigenous people in Canada with the Canadian government and the Catholic church. Here is the story of those who survived Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS), and stories of descendants of KIRS who remembered "the missing” in the wake of the discovery of unmarked graves at the KIRS. Here, in hauntingly visceral poems, are the living conditions, policies and practices of the school itself, the stories of those who lived there, and the names of practitioners of the school, called out and cursed. Lastly, personal stories are given space to reclaim the narrative, taking readers on a journey of resilience, survival, pain and joy.

Reviews
"Drawing on the work of the late legal scholar Patricia Monture-Angus, I find fitting words for this book and for the former students of KIRS: first we were victims, then we were survivors and now we are warriors. Those warriors have now become teachers—teachers for those who learn to listen to the voices in this book."—from the prologue by Celia Haig-Brown

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126 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

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The Glass Lodge: 20th Anniversary Edition
$34.99
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781998273119

Synopsis:

A new edition, revised and updated by the author, of John Brady McDonald’s acclaimed debut poetry collection

John Brady McDonald, MBSFA, a Nêhiyawak-Métis multidisciplinary artist and writer from Treaty Six Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, is an award-winning author of multiple books who has presented at literary festivals around the world. Before all this, however, he was a young, urban Indigenous youth, struggling with addictions, the streets, and the pain and turmoil of intergenerational trauma as a residential school survivor and the child of residential school survivors.

These raw, lyrical poems are a glimpse of the birth of a poet, recklessly using language and words with abandon and without restraint. It is the poetry of an individual experimenting with the language, influenced by the works of Shakespeare and Jim Morrison, mixed with the teenage goth writing style of youth—the base metals from which a lifetime of words was forged.

Originally published by Kegedonce Press in 2004, The Glass Lodge was presented across Canada and the US at esteemed festivals. Chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program, it was also nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year in 2005. Since that first edition went out of print a few years ago, McDonald has re-edited and restored the work. He also rediscovered many of the original, handwritten poems, which serve as illustrations in this new edition.

Reviews
"The Glass Lodge transcends all the cliches of the angst-ridden Urban Indian. McDonald's verse is a brilliant fusion of the brutality and hope that is inherent in the Aboriginal experience. I have never read poetry that so closely resembles my own experience as a First Nations man." - Darrell Dennis, Writer, Tales of an Urban Indian, Moccasin Flats

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74 pages | 6.00" x 8.50" | Hardcover | 2nd Edition 

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Barely Amazing: Selected Poems of Shane Koyczan
$27.40
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9780984503179

Synopsis:

In this collection, Shane skillfully takes the readers on a trek through deserts of loneliness, labyrinths of loss, and meadows of healing. The landscapes of our emotions range from the perilous to the serene, and these poems become a companion, a confidant, a source of solace, and a survival guide for the reader.

Shane's unique voice weaves humor and storytelling into his verses. With levity as a setup for power, each poem promises to take you on a zipline of emotions, leaving you both laughing and reflecting on life's miracles. While the freefall through our emotions may at times feel like a hazard, Shane creates a place to land safely without having to sacrifice the impact created by their velocity. These works are flint and tinder, wrestling as a tag team against the cold and dark we sometimes find ourselves lost in.

The works contained within do not tell us where to dig for the buried treasure of our hearts… they remind us that the treasure does in fact exist, and they lay bare what is amazing about what our hearts can endure.

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118 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback 

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The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781989496916

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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.

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120 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

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Teeth: Poems
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780889714526

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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.”

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112 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

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What Fills Your House Like Smoke
$19.95
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Métis;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781771872522

Synopsis:

In these poems, E. McGregor combines the lore of family history with personal memory, vividly parsing patterns of inheritance, particularly through the maternal line.

What Fills Your House Like Smoke begins and ends at the deathbed of the writer's Metis grandmother. In between, McGregor composes an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of the grandmother, interrogated by family photographs, stories, and the scant paper trail she left behind.

McGregor sifts through the complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, anxiety, intimate relationships and addiction, weaving family history with memory to make sense of what is carried on. Especially affecting are poems about childhood, and the people who disappear from a child's life, and the struggle to live as a societal outsider, finding strength in self-definition and the power of narrative.

As these poems unfold, they move us toward an understanding of maternal inheritance, shifting identities, forgiveness, and finally love.

Reviews
"There is a rawness and tender vulnerability in the re-membering of a mother's mother's life in the thematic dotted lines, hardlines and blurred lines of McGregor's poetry. For bodies under duress, survival is instinctive and passed on, and a breakthrough from the trauma endured is made possible in an honest remembering to liberate oneself." -- Rita Bouvier, author of a beautiful rebellion

"What Fills Your House Like Smoke is a staggering collection . . . technically agile and thematically nuanced. McGregor's poems have the effect of flame, sucking the air out of the room; of a soothing hand on your chest, reminding you to breathe. An indelible debut." -- Hollay Ghadery, author of Rebellion Box

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90 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | Paperback

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Sorry About the Fire
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781771966139

Synopsis:

I wanted a good bewildering, / down deep, / as the keep of a castle.

With a voice as ungovernable and determined as Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus only to face dire consequences—Colleen Coco Collins' debut poems are daring dispatches from beyond the margins: light-filled flares sent up from the edge of language, sentience, land, and story. Drawing on all of her multidisciplinary enamorations and rendered through the triple vision of her Irish, French, and Odawa heritage, Sorry About the Fire introduces not just a poet, but a stunningly original sensibility.

Reviews
"Fealty to the sentient. To every mostleast thing, to every impulse (sentient), gesture (sentient). Re-resourcing language to equip it to be fit: bawaajigan. telamon. mothaitheacht ... Collins' Sorry About the Fire is the story of a dark time, in which the strike of language on the texture of reality sounds a sharp off-note—and sparks; and/or the story of a light-drenched time in which a sensibility cracks open, beholding/becoming."—Luke Hathaway, author of The Affirmations

"Colleen Coco Collins employs vocabulary as a joyful precision tool, re-earthing the intimate relations between wonder, grief, and the more-than-human world. Embodying the playful and destructive energy of the cosmos, her poems vibrate like some kind of ancient, sacred rock & roll."—Shary Boyle

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64 pages | 5.00" x 8.00" | Paperback

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Removal Acts
$24.00
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous American; Native American; Sioux; Dakota;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781644452530

Synopsis:

Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.

Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms—as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit—Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.

Reviews
"In this sharp debut, words are bracketed and struck through, placed in columns and alongside arrows. . . . With each deliberate letter, Lynch deconstructs a violent past and present, while allowing herself and the reader to search for paths toward an as-yet unknown future."—Dasia Moore, The Boston Globe

"Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry book, Removal Acts, is a deeply personal, formally inventive investigation into history, ancestry, and loss. . . . Throughout the work, Lynch’s language remains precise, compassionate, inquisitive, and vulnerable."—Mathangi Subramanian, BOMB Magazine

"Lynch interweaves the stories of two of her ancestors with her own recovery from bulimia to explore the twinned legacies of historical and self erasure. The result is a moving meditation on 'removal' in its many forms that melds together the personal and historical to craft a testament to Indigenous resilience and survival in the face of eradication."—Eliza Browning, Electric Literature

"Removal Acts is a rich and fraught collection that confronts the legacy of displacement and erasure with searing honesty. Debut author Erin Marie Lynch does not shy away from hard questions, including her right to some of the stories in her collection. . . . Removal Acts combines technical prowess and attention to craft with deliberate experimentation, signaling Lynch as a poet with talent that far surpasses expectations for a debut author."—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

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136 pages | 7.05" x 8.97" | Paperback

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Love Life Loss and a little bit of hope: Poems from the Soul
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781990735431

Synopsis:

“We should not have to change to fit into society the world should adapt to embrace our uniqueness.” -- Chief Stacey Laforme

Chief Stacey Laforme breathes life into every poem and story he shares, drawing from his own experiences. Rich with the essence of his soul, the poems in this book capture the moments and emotions that have shaped him. His desire is for readers to not just read, but to truly feel the humour and pain intertwined in these poems. Much like in Living in the Tall Grass, this latest poetry collection invites non-Indigenous people to see through the eyes of Indigenous people with topics of peace and humanity, as well as grief, trauma ... and hope.

Reviews
"Thought provoking, healing meditations. Giima Laforme writes from his perspective as a son, father, husband, community leader, but most of all as a human being. He invites us to walk with him, and to see the world as he sees it. Not only is this an invitation we should accept, but it is also a beautiful and generous gift." — Kevin Hearn, musician

"Chief Stacey Laforme writes with the motive of love, and poetry is his instrument. When considering the unmarked graves at residential schools, Chief Laforme’s poem ‘Debwewin—Truth’ freezes you with the line, “She felt the shovels enter her body.” But as you will see, there is always hope. Chief has both the scalpel and the suture. He cuts, then he cures." —Ron MacLean, broadcaster

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160 pages | 8.50" x 5.50" | Paperback | 3 b&w illustrations 

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When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry
$25.95
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Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous American;
Grade Levels: 12; University/College;
ISBN / Barcode: 9780393356809

Synopsis:

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.

This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize–winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

Reviews
This anthology is revelatory and stunning.… It shows the remarkable strength and diversity of Native poetry, which vitalizes all of American poetry. It is essential reading.—Arthur Sze, National Book Award–winning author of Sight Lines

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352 pages | 6.14" x 9.29" | Paperback

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Once the Smudge is Lit
$20.00
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ISBN / Barcode: 9781928120407

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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 from beginning to end.

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50 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 50 Illustrations | Paperback

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Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (1 in stock)
$40.95
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Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian;
Grade Levels: 12; University/College;
ISBN / Barcode: 9781551112008

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Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology is the only collection of its kind. It brings together the poetry of many authors whose work has not previously been published in book form alongside that of critically-acclaimed poets, thus offering a record of Native cultural revival as it emerged through poetry from the 1960s to the present. The poets included here adapt English oratory and, above all, a sense of play. Native Poetry in Canada suggests both a history of struggle to be heard and the wealth of Native cultures in Canada today.

Reviews
“This collection shows the breadth of contemporary Native poetry, from the resistance literature of the many poems remembering the murdered Helen Betty Osborne to the playful fishing game of Daniel David Moses; it is an excellent anthology.” — Terry Goldie, York University, co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English

“Armstrong and Grauer have arranged a collection of works of extraordinary breadth in their thematic treatment of cultural, political, and spiritual subjects. Instructors will value the accompanying biographical information, the substantial selections from each poet’s work, and the authors’ prefatory comments, all of which situate this collection as an ideal text for the university classroom.” — Canadian Literature

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360 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

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acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina?: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin? The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; First Nations; Cree (Nehiyawak);
Grade Levels: 10; 11; 12; University/College;
ISBN / Barcode: 9781778690174

Synopsis:

Aided by Grandmother Spider, Star Woman discovers the Hole-in-the-Sky, opening a pathway for the Star People to experience the wonder of life on earth. But the world falls into the hands of the Paper People, jeopardizing the sacred harmony between nature and the cosmos. And so Little Spirit, a young boy, must search for meaning and find redemption in the care of Grandmother Moon.

An epic narrative, The Star Poems explores the black hole of colonial history—Residential Schools, the loss of the father, youth suicide—and the vital role of women in reclaiming our traditional knowledge, the teachings that stitch together the fabric of the universe.

The Star Poems creatively engages Cree oral tradition in a new way, connecting Indigenous spirituality and quantum physics to honour and adapt some of our most ancient stories about the origins of life and our place in the universe. Presented in both English and Cree, The Star Poems is a timely contribution to the revitalization of the Cree language—and the fascinating world of star stories.

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Recommended for ages 15+

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132 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

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The New Wascana Anthology: Poetry, Short Fiction, and Critical Prose
$49.50
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian;
ISBN / Barcode: 9780889773080

Synopsis:

The New Wascana Anthology is named for the Cree word "oskana," meaning "bones,"* but this anthology is no literary graveyard. It will introduce you to stories, poems, and essays that can be discussed over drinks, or used to impress friends years after leaving English 100 behind.

Offering a taster's choice of the best Canadian writing, with a special focus on Aboriginal and Prairie writers, this anthology includes pieces selected to introduce you to the English literary canon. Going back hundreds of years, the oldest poems included here have no known author, while the youngest writer is a recent university graduate.

Building on the bones of the canon (including all of Canada's Man Booker Prize-winners and newest Nobel Laureate), The New Wascana Anthology features writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Thomas King, Carmine Starnino, and Ursula K. Le Guin who will challenge your worldview. Most importantly, this anthology is about turning the page, opening your mind, and revelling in the pleasures of reading.

*The bones referred to are the bones of plains bison, a species that once numbered in the tens of millions on the Great Plains.

Educator Information
Contains works from Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers.

Table of Contents

Preface

Poetry

Anonymous
Summer is icumen in
Sir Patrick Spens
Mary Hamilton

Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400)
from The Canterbury Tales
Excerpts from General Prologue

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542)
          The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbour

Sir Walter Ralegh (ca. 1552–1618)
          The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552–1599)
from Amoretti
          30. My love is like to ice
          75. One day I wrote her name

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
from Astrophel and Stella
          59. Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?

Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
from Idea
          61. Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
          The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
 
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
from Sonnets
          18. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
          20. A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted
          116. Let me not to the marriage of true minds
          130. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
from As You Like It
          All the world’s a stage
 
John Donne (1572–1631)
          A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
          Death be not proud
          The Bait
          The Flea

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
          Epigram XXII: On My First Daughter
          Epigram XLV: On My First Son
          Song: To Celia

George Herbert (1593–1633)
          Love (III)
 
John Milton (1608–1674)
          When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
from Paradise Lost, Book 1
          The Invocation

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672)
          Before the Birth of One of Her Children
          The Author to Her Book

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
          To His Coy Mistress
 
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1661–1720)
          To the Nightingale
          A Letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
          The Rape of the Lock

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
          Addressed to—

Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
          Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
from Jubilate Agno
          My Cat Jeoffry
 
William Blake (1757–1827)
from Songs of Innocence
          The Chimney Sweeper
          The Lamb
from Songs of Experience
          A Poison Tree
          London
          The Chimney Sweeper

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
          A slumber did my spirit seal
          Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
          I wandered lonely as a cloud
          The world is too much with us

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
          Kubla Khan
 
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
          She Walks in Beauty
          The Destruction of Sennacherib

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
          Ozymandias

John Keats (1795–1821)
          La Belle Dame Sans Merci
          When I have fears that I may cease to be

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
          Ulysses
 
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
          Porphyria’s Lover
          My Last Duchess
 
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
          Remembrance

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
          When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
 
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
          Dover Beach

George Meredith (1828–1909)
from Modern Love
          17. At dinner, she is hostess, I am host

Emily Dickinson (1830–1866)
          F479. Because I could not stop for Death
          F591. I heard a Fly buzz—when I died
          F620. Much Madness is divinest Sense
          F1096. A narrow Fellow in the Grass
          F1263. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
          Jabberwocky

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
          The Ruined Maid
          The Convergence of the Twain
          The Workbox

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
          God’s Grandeur
          Pied Beauty
          The Windhover

A. E. Housman (1859–1936)
from A Shropshire Lad
          XIX. To An Athlete Dying Young

Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943)
          Tantramar Revisited

Archibald Lampman (1861–1899)
          Heat

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
          The Second Coming
          Leda and the Swan
          Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
          Miniver Cheevy

Robert Frost (1874–1963)
          After Apple-Picking
          Mending Wall
          Nothing Gold Can Stay
          The Silken Tent

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
          The Red Wheelbarrow
          This is Just to Say
          Pictures from Brueghel

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
          Piano
          Snake

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
          In a Station of the Metro
          The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)
          Break of Day in the Trenches

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
          Elegy before Death
          What lips my lips have kissed

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
          Dulce et Decorum Est

e.e. cummings (1894–1963)
          “next to of course god america i
          anyone lived in a pretty how town

F. R. Scott (1899–1985)
          Lakeshore
 
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
          The Negro Speaks of Rivers
          Harlem

A. J. M. Smith (1902–1980)
          The Lonely Land
          Far West

Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
          Not Waving but Drowning

Earle Birney (1904–1995)
          Anglo-Saxon Street

W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
          Musée des Beaux-Arts

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
          My Papa’s Waltz

A. M. Klein (1909–1972)
          Heirloom
          The Rocking Chair

Dorothy Livesay (1909–1996)
          Green Rain

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
          In the Waiting Room

Irving Layton (1912–2006)
          The Birth of Tragedy

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
          Fern Hill
          Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

P. K. Page (1916–2010)
          After Rain
          Planet Earth
 
Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
          For the Union Dead

Miriam Waddington (1917–2004)
          Advice to the Young

Raymond Souster (1921–2012)
          The Lilac Poem
 
Elizabeth Brewster (1922–2012)
          The Night Grandma Died

Eli Mandel (1922–1992)
          Houdini

Anne Szumigalski (1926–1999)
          It Wasn’t a Major Operation

Don Coles (b. 1927)
          Collecting Pictures
 
Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011)
          Meditation on Tom Thomson

Rita Joe (1932–2007)
          Axe Handles for Sale
          I Lost My Talk

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
          Daddy

Alden Nowlan (1933–1983)
          The Bull Moose

Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)
          A Kite Is a Victim
          Suzanne

Robert Currie (b. 1937)
          Young Boy, Fleeing

Glen Sorestad (b. 1937)
          Ten Years
          Now That I’m Up

John Newlove (1938–2003)
          The Double-Headed Snake

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
          Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
          The Nature of Gothic
          This Is a Photograph of Me

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
          Bog Queen
          Digging
          The Names of the Hare

Patrick Lane (b. 1939)
          Mountain Oysters

Gary Hyland (1940–2011)
from Arguments in the Garden of Prayer
          1. So many frogs
          14. The first sounds

Beth Brant (b. 1941)
          for all my Grandmothers

Robert Hass (b. 1941)
          Consciousness

Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941–1987)
          Manzini: Escape Artist

Marie Annharte Baker (b. 1942)
          Pretty Tough Skin Woman

Louise Glück (b. 1943)
          Illuminations

Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943)
          The Cinnamon Peeler
          White Dwarfs

Dennis Cooley (b. 1944)
          how there in the plaid light she played with his affections plied them spikes from his heart she stood by pliers in hand he has his pride

Craig Raine (b. 1944)
          A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Tom Wayman (b. 1945)
          Did I Miss Anything?
 
Linda Hogan (b. 1947)
          Cities Behind Glass

Lorna Crozier (b. 1948)
          The Dirty Thirties
          Poem about Nothing
from The Sex Lives of Vegetables
          Radishes
          Lettuce
          Cauliflower

Beth Cuthand (b. 1949)
          Four Songs for the Fifth Generation

Kathleen Wall (b. 1950)
          Morning Nocturne

Joy Harjo (b. 1951)
          She Had Some Horses

Gerald Hill (b. 1951)
          Becoming and Going: An Oldsmobile Story

Di Brandt (b. 1952)
          completely seduced

Louise Halfe (b. 1953)
          She Told Me

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
          Dear John Wayne
          Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
          Jacklight

Jeanette Lynes (b. 1956)
          The Last Interview with Bettie Page

Anne Simpson (b. 1956)
          Grammar Exercise

George Elliott Clarke (b. 1960)
          Blank Sonnet

Michael Crummey (b. 1965)
          Her Mark

Gregory Scofield (b. 1966)
          His Flute, My Ears

Karen Solie (b. 1966)
          Parasitology

Randy Lundy (b. 1967)
          Bear
          Ghost Dance

Stephanie Bolster (b. 1969)
          To Dolly

Carmine Starnino (b. 1970)
          Pepino’s Poem, “Growing Up in Naples”
          Rope Husbandry

Daniel Scott Tysdal (b. 1978)
          Metro

Cassidy McFadzean (b. 1989)
          I smile earwide

Short Fiction

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)
          The Approximate Size of My Favourite Tumour

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
          My Last Duchess

Sandra Birdsell (b. 1942)
          Disappearances

Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
          Cathedral

William Faulkner (1897–1962)
          A Rose for Emily

Richard Ford (b. 1944)
          Sweethearts

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
          The Yellow Wall-paper

James Joyce (1882–1941)
          Araby

Thomas King (b. 1943)
          A Seat in the Garden

Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
          The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Alexander MacLeod (b. 1972)
          Miracle Mile

Alistair MacLeod (1936-2014)
          The Boat

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
          The Garden-Party

Yann Martel (b. 1963)
          The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Rohinton Mistry (b. 1952)
          Swimming Lessons

Ken Mitchell (b. 1940)
          The Great Electrical Revolution

Alice Munro (b. 1931)
          The Bear Came over the Mountain

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
          A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
          The Cask of Amontillado

Eden Robinson (b. 1968)
          Traplines

Gloria Sawai (1932–2011)
          The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts

Guy Vanderhaeghe (b. 1951)
          Dancing Bear

Dianne Warren (b. 1950)
          Bone Garden

Critical Prose

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)
          Evolution as Fact and Theory

Trevor Herriot (b. 1958)
from Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds
          A Way Home

Barbara Kingsolver (b. 1955)
          Setting Free the Crabs

Don McKay (b. 1942)
          Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home, and Nature Poetry

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
          A Modest Proposal

Copyright Notices

Index of Authors and Titles

Index of First Lines of Poetry

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554 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

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Building a Nest from the Bones of my People
$22.95
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Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Métis;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781778430305

Synopsis:

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.

Reviews
"Cara-Lyn Morgan offers not only loss, grief, and anger in this powerful collection, but also resolve, resistance, and reckoning—with the past, with what we bequeath our children, and the intentionality of those decisions. A brilliant and resonant meditation on becoming a mother and what it takes to build a new nest from the salvage of what’s been given to us. 'Burn the sage. / we’re done.'"—Lisa Bird-Wilson, author of Probably Ruby

"With her new collection, Cara-Lyn Morgan, demonstrates the lyrical alchemy of transforming ancestral pain into poetic gold through the unflinching art of truth-telling. These poems are raw as nerve endings, encapsulating wisdom enduring as teeth and bones. They are tender, well-crafted, and fearless—reminding us how speaking out into stifling silence can create muscle strong enough to move a woman from fearful mourning to courageous motherhood. Through Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, the pain of the past is excavated like an aching, crooked bone—rebroken to set the future on firm footing. Smoldering embers of generational trauma are doused, ghosts are set to rest and the seeds of hope begin to blossom. We can all heal. With this hauntingly beautiful collection, Morgan shows us how."—Andrea Thompson, author of A Selected History of Soul Speak

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80 pages | 5.13" x 8.03" | Paperback

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Crushed Wild Mint
$19.95
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ISBN / Barcode: 9780889714502

Synopsis:

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.

Awards

  • 2024 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award winner
  • 2024 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award winner

Reviews
"When the mountains of your territory are your ancestors, you paint the landscapes as Jess Housty does in this evocative, powerful collection of poetry: in the language of ceremony as taut as the inner surface of a mussel shell when the meat is stripped away. Their hyperlocality is precise medicine, an expansive, generous meditation on the mutual care of mountains, the forgiving veins of rivers, all the liminal territories and beings soaked in the verdant magic of the Pacific Northwest Coast." — Eden Robinson

"I return to read and then stop to wonder, return to read and still wonder: How is this so true? Let these words love you. They’ll sing." — Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Additional Information
132 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
Elements
$21.95
Quantity:
Format: Paperback
Text Content Territories: Indigenous Canadian; Inuit;
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781772274844

Synopsis:

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.

Educator Information
Bilingual Verse in English and Inuktitut 

Additional Information
132 pages | 7.00" x 9.25" | 10 b&w Photos | Paperback

Authentic Canadian Content
Authentic Indigenous Text
A Family of Dreamers
$18.95
Quantity:
Format: Paperback
Reading Level: N/A
ISBN / Barcode: 9781772015478

Synopsis:

In this debut poetry collection, Samantha Nock redefines where and what “home” is.

A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves together threads of fat liberation, desirability politics, and heartbreak while working through her existence as a young Indigenous woman coming of age in the city. The result is a love song to northern cuzzins, dive bars, and growing up.

Additional Information
101 pages | 5.98" x 9.01" | Paperback

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Strong Nations Publishing

2595 McCullough Rd
Nanaimo, BC, Canada, V9S 4M9

Phone: (250) 758-4287

Email: contact@strongnations.com

Strong Nations - Indigenous & First Nations Gifts, Books, Publishing; & More! Our logo reflects the greater Nation we live within—Turtle Island (North America)—and the strength and core of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples—the Cedar Tree, known as the Tree of Life. We are here to support the building of strong nations and help share Indigenous voices.