Poetry

"His voice was as thick as pine resin when he began to read and as the words travelled down my spine."

Mary Barnes has identified beauty in subtlety. What Fox Knew captures our gentle world in rich poems that calm and awaken. Amid landscape and truth, the quiet world we take for granted is revealed anew with tempered grace. Bringing her Ojibwe roots to the fore, the poet has constructed a first collection that settles on masterful.

Reviews
"What Fox Knew is a beautiful collection of poems that lead us to reflect on the essential spaces of beauty, justice, love, home and nation. Mary Barnes is the poet whose work I've been waiting to read; I had no idea how much until I read these poems. These are not quick poems; they are not desperate, or rushed. Barnes' poems are, to quote her, "thick as resin" and also gorgeously clear as amber in the light. --Juliane Okot Bitek

Additional Information
136 pages | 5.00" x 7.50"

An exquisite series of meditations on memory, evanescence and the land. Randy Lundy draws deeply from his Cree heritage and equally from European and Asian traditions. Readers will be reminded by turns of Simon Ortiz, P?r Lagerkvist, and Jane Hirshfield. This is the mind of prayer, a seeing and re-seeing of the immense cyclic beauty of the earth.

Reviews
“Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside. His poems join the shades that walk among them. There aren’t many people who get to that place and sometimes it can feel very lonely there, but the masters are saved by the brilliant and humble work they have done, their poems the crevices in our lives where the light shines through." – Patrick Lane, author of Washita

“Randy Lundy’s poems bring forward the spirit of his Cree ancestry, and place our species humbly among the creatures of Earth—who are all observed with deep reverence and perceptive care.” – Don McKay, author of Strike/Slip

“This is the book of poems I’ve been waiting for … His poems burn us, feed us, and make us feel beloved even if we have been broken. Language, as he uses it, holds us and leads us to a place where we can mourn and pray and wonder.” – Lorna Crozier, author of What the Soul Doesn’t Want

Educator & Series Information
The Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools list recommends this resource for Grades 10-12 for English Language Arts.

Caution: Some poems contain content that may cause trigger reactions for readers. Pre-read poems before using them with students.

This work is part of the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series. Publishing new and established authors, Oskana Poetry & Poetics offers both contemporary poetry at its best and probing discussions of poetry’s cultural role. Oskana is the Cree word for "bones," and it is used with the blessing of Elder Noel Starblanket. The name reflects a commitment to speak to the deepest and most urgent issues of our time, including environmental crisis and Indigenous justice. 

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In this, her third volume of poetry, this Aboriginal writer from Quebec again confronts the loss of her landscape and language.

On my left hip
a face

I walk
I walk upright
like a shadow

a people on my hip
a boatload of fruit
and the dream inside
women and children first

"A cry rises in me and transfigures me. The world waits for woman to come back as she was born: woman standing, woman powerful, woman resurgent. A call rises in me and I've decided to say yes to my birth."

Reviews
"Poetess, painter, actress, slammer ... Natasha Kanapé Fontaine speaks with a soft voice, but her words are powerful. In a few years, the young Innue has become a model for young people and for her community." —La Presse

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list as being useful for grades 9-12 for English Language Arts and Social Studies.

Additional Information
72 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Translated from French by Howard Scott.

Hiraeth is about women supporting and lending strength and clarity to other women so they know that moving forward is always possible-- and always necessary. It documents a journey of struggle that pertains to a dark point in Canadian history that few talk about and of which even fewer seem aware. Poems speak to the 1960's "scoop up" of children and how this affected the lives of (one or thousands) of First Nations and Métis girls-- girls who later grew to be women with questions, women with wounds, women who felt like they had no place to call home. That is, until they allowed themselves to be open to the courage others have lived and shared. "Hiraeth" is a word that is Celtic in origin and it means looking for a place to belong that never existed. But this place does exist -- in the heart.

Educator Information
The 2018-2019 Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools list recommends this resource for Grades 9-12 for English Language Arts and Social Studies.

Caution: some poems contain depictions of violence and racism and use strong language.

Additional Information
112 pages | 7.50" x 6.00"

From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural.

The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs series, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

Awards

• NPR Book of the Year Award 
• Winner of the 2018 Whiting Award

Reviews
"Tommy Pico's books are contemporary epics. He writes poetry of rare brilliance, assured in form and forceful in its interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self."—Whiting Award Committee

"Tommy Pico's new collection, Junk, is nimble as jazz, intentionally unstable, a queer Beat novel in verse for the social media age." —Gregory Cowles, The New York Times Book Review

"Junk is a true American odyssey, complete with a reluctant hero who defies all odds to survive. Repulsed by the trashiness of empire, the violence of occupation, this book nonetheless searches in earnest for real tenderness, a romance that isn’t corny. . . . This is poetry of the highest order, on the level of a pop song, with the crystalline visions of a seer. I consumed it greedily, repeatedly, and am forever changed because of it." —Jenny Zhang, author of SOUR HEART

"Tommy Pico’s complex and lush third collection, Junk, explodes, rewinds, meditates, and explodes again. It binges and purges—on class, identity, sex, politics, snacks, comfort, and fear. . . . Pico is a master of inclusion, of elevating the mundane to the sublime, of examining absurdity and grave seriousness with equal measure. This is an ambitious long poem, and Pico is uniquely qualified to both drag and celebrate modern day consumption and indulgence with graceful humor and grit."—Morgan Parker, author of THERE ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAN BEYONCE

"Whiting Award-winner Tommy Pico follows his cult favorites Nature Poem and IRL with a gloriously wide-ranging monologue on love and friendship, queer and indigenous identity, Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. Pico builds his own 21st-century poetics, junk and all—and as he writes, 'It's important / to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories.'" —NPR

"Build[s] into an apocalyptic crescendo via Pico’s propulsive fervor . . . Pico demonstrates that a person’s many selves, traumas, anxieties, hookups, and breakups can become a marker of courage and survival."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Additional Information
80 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

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

In Living in the Tall Grass: Poems of Reconciliation, Chief Stacey Laforme gives a history of his Anishinaabe people through stories and poetry to let Canadians see through the eyes of Indigenous people. Living in the Tall Grass is written in a way that makes the reader feel he or she might be sitting down with Chief Laforme, sharing experiences from their lives. Some poems share humour, while others express pain, though each comes from the heart.

Reviews
"Laforme is a high-profile leader, attending scores of events, large and small in Ontario and gently reminding listeners that most of the southern part of the province is the traditional homelands of the Mississaugas of the New Credit. True to his belief in the longer-lasting impact of the arts, he’ll often open a speech with a verse. “The future lies in the arts, and it lies in all our youth, not just the Indigenous youth,” he says. “Arts make change … if we can share a moment through the arts whether its song, dance, poetry, painting, it transcends even language barriers." — Steve Milton, The Hamilton Spectator

Educator Information
Recommended for Grades 5-12 for English Language Arts.

Caution: Some poems touch on violence and suicide.

Themes: hope, the environment, Residential Schools.

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | duotone photographs

Governor General’s Award–winning Métis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette’s second work of poetry, river woman, examines and celebrates love as postcolonial action. Here love is defined as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma, and trauma is understood to exist within all times. The poems are grounded in what feels like an eternal present, documenting moments of clarity that lift the speaker (and reader) out of our preconceptions of historical time, while never losing a connection to history. This is what we mean when we describe a work of art as being “timeless.”

Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it’s through language and the body — particularly through language as it lives inside the body — that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker revels in the physical pleasures of learning Anishnaabemowin (“the language / I should have already known”), as she contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the natural world and urban structures, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.

Divided into four sections, and written in her distinctively lean and elegantly spare style, where short lines belie the depth within them, river woman explores Vermette’s relationship to nature — its destructive power and beauty, its timelessness, and its place in human history. Here is a poet who is a keen observer of an environment that is both familiar and otherworldly, where her home is alive with the sounds and smells of the land it grows out of, where “Words / transcend ceremony / into everyday” and “Nothing / is inanimate.”

Reviews
“‘A snake carved / into prairie grass,’ river woman is a collection that will stay with you, question you, live in you. One cannot simply tread the surface of its open invitation. There are many layers here below the poetic surface, and Vermette is singer-guide to the true depths of this river. It’s a work to be read, shared, and read again.” — Liz Howard, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

“In river woman, Katherena Vermette marshals the maternal energy of the river to spin the lyric poem into something that is awash with vitality. This ethic of care, which each section bears and ricochets about, has at its core a project of repair or nourishment, not just of the natural, but of those of us entangled with it. This us, Vermette deftly shows, is not an empty thing, but is instead teeming with Indigenous life — ‘we are the earth you are hurting.’ We are the river and, in this, we are without end, regardless of what history swells in us. Pick up this book and listen for the musicality of our beautiful rebellion!” — Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize 

“river woman again displays Vermette’s extraordinary gift for narrative. ‘Ziibiwan (like a river),’ these are poems that gather pieces of personal experience and Indigenous history and in their sweep are bigger than the spare language we see on the page.” — Armand Garnet Ruffo, author of The Thunderbird Poems 

Educator Information
Recommended for ages 16 and up.

Curriculum Connections: English, Poetry, Indigenous Studies, Nature 

Additional Information
112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Seven Sacred Truths explores the perspective of an Indigenous Woman on a continuous journey of healing from trauma.

Seven Sacred Truths presents a powerful exploration of an Indigenous woman's healing journey. Seeing the world through "brown" eyes, poet Wanda John-Kehewin makes new meaning of the past, present, and future through a consideration of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, Respect, Humility, and Courage. By sharing her views on these Seven Sacred Truths and what they meant to her growing up, John-Kehewin instigates a therapeutic process of restoration and transformation. Her Seven Sacred Truths uncovers new meaning in the written word - meaning that can be shared with others who have lived trauma or who want insight into it. John-Kehewin strives to create a safe space and provide the opportunity to experience another perspective; she invites readers to embark on their own healing journeys. The closer you are to the truth, she writes, the freer you become.

Wanda John-Kehewin uses writing as a therapeutic medium to understand and respond to the near-decimation of First Nations cultures and traditions.

Educator Information
Recommended in the Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2019-2020 resource list for grades 10 to 12 for English Language Arts.

Additional Information
120 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

A unique collection of graphically reimagined fiction and poetry.

By merging works of contemporary North American Indigenous literature with imaginative illustrations by U.S. and Canadian artists, Sovereign Traces: Not (Just) (An)Other provides a unique opportunity for audiences to engage with works by prominent authors such as Stephen Graham Jones, Gordon Henry Jr., Gerald Vizenor, Warren Cariou, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Richard Van Camp, and Gwen Westerman.

Through this exciting medium, Sovereign Traces beckons to audiences that are both new to and familiar with Native writing, allowing for possibilities for reimagined readings along the way.

Readers will find works of graphic literature, uniquely including both poetry and fiction, newly adapted from writing by Indigenous North Americans. 

Writers
Warren Cariou, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Gordon G. Henry Jr., Stephen Graham Jones, Sheldon Raymore, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, Richard Van Camp, Gerald Vizenor, Gwen Nell Westerman

Illustrators and Colourists
Weshoyot Alvitre, Evan Buchanan, Nicholas Burns, GMB Chomichuk, Scott B. Henderson, Elizabeth LaPensée, Tara Ogaick, Neal Shannacappo, Delicia Williams, Donovan Yaciuk

Content
Preface: Beginnings and Future Imaginings
Foreword: Not (Just) (An)Other
Werewolves on the Moon
The Prisoner of Hiaku
Ice Tricksters
An Athabasca Story
Trickster Reflections
The Strange People
Deer Dancer
Mermaids
Just Another Naming Ceremony

Reviews
“Not just another book for fans of Indigenous stories and comics alike, this collection locates myth not in the past, but in the mundane, drawing on traditional cultures and stories to depict current Indigenous lives in their many complex forms.” — Nyala Ali, Winnipeg Free Press

Additional Information
128 pages | 6.62" x 10.12"

In this second installation of the Overhead Series, Lucy Haché once again transports the reader with intimate revelations on identity by exploring both her personal and ancestral relationship to the sky and stars. Hache's prose is extraordinary in its combination of self-awareness yet unselfconscious honesty and skillful restraint, creating a sense of connection under the vastness of the stars above. Masterfully illustrated by artist Michael Joyal, his evocative astronomic drawings contribute to the overall sensory and transcendent experience.

Reviews
"[Hache] uses the stars to remember not only the tribulations of the past - Residential Schools and the loss of her traditional village - but also to remember the happiness of her grandmothers and to remember her language. Her poetic prose if full of imagery so rich that the reader can feel swept away with the power of the language." - Canadian Indigenous Books for Schools 2018-2019

"Indigenous People have always had a strong relationship with the sky. Here, Joyal's stark, beautiful illustrations combine perfectly with Haché's voice as she sings a story of loss, and ultimately, reclamation." --David A. Robertson, author of When We Were Alone (winner 2017 Governor General's Literary Award) and Strangers

Educator & Series Information
Recommended resource for Grades 8-12 for these subject areas: English Language Arts. 

A Kwak'wala language glossary is found at the back of the book.

This book is part of the Overhead Series.

Additional Information
80 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

The Rumour is a collection of poetry that exposes many important issues of Indigenous discrimination, poverty, drug abuse, brutal violence, love, family, and complex human relationships. As a skilled painter, Joseph A. Dandurand portrays the essence of strong connections with rich Indigenous history, culture, traditions, and family values with broad but precise strokes. The poems come from author's lifetime experience living on the Kwantlen First Nation reserve and give a true picture of the resilience and the struggles Indigenous people experience in everyday life.

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

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In his debut poetry collection you are enough: love poems for the end of the world, Smokii Sumac has curated a selection of works from two years of a near daily poetry practice. What began as a sort of daily online poetry journal using the hashtag #haikuaday, has since transformed into a brilliant collection of storytelling drawing upon Indigenous literary practice, and inspired by works like Billy Ray Belcourt's This Wound is a World, and Tenille Campbell's #IndianLovePoems.

The poems follow the haiku format, often stringing together three lines to tell a story. With sections dealing with recovery from addiction and depression, coming home through ceremony, and of course, as the title suggests, on falling in and out of love, Sumac brings the reader through two years of life as a Ktunaxa Two-Spirit person. This collection will move you as Sumac addresses the grief of being an Indigenous person in Canada, shares timely (and sometimes hilarious) musings on consent, sex, and gender, introduces readers to people and places he has loved and learned from, and through it all, helps us all come to know that we are enough, just as we are.

Awards

• 2019 Indigenous Voices Awards Winner for Published Poetry in English

Additional Information
108 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Covering Indigenous adventures from Wahpole Island to Northern Saskatchewan to the coast of Vancouver, #IndianLovePoems is a poetry collection that delves into the humour and truths of love and lust within Indigenous communities. Sharing stories in search of The One, or even better, that One-Night-Stand, or the opening of boundaries -- can we say medicine wheel -- this collection fearlessly sheds light on the sharing and honesty that comes with discussions of men, women, sex, and relationships, using humour to chat about the complexities of race, culture and intent within relationships. From discovering your own John Smith to sharing sushi in bed, #IndianLovePoems will make you smile, shake your head, and remember your own stories about that special someone.

Reviews
"These are resolutely modern poems written for the great variety of women and LGBTQ2S people of today. They turn the stereotypes of the “Vanishing Indian” and “unchanging cultures” upside down with mentions of campus life, sexting, Tinder, and of course Twitter (the poems have non-serialized numbers with hashtags). There is power in Campbell’s creative use of imagery and everyday language. #IndianLovePoems is a must-read from a very exciting new voice who will undoubtedly become an established name." - Sylvie Vranckx, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review

Additional Information
96 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

In this bilingual English-Innu poetry collection, Joséphine Bacon challenges our traditional notions of culture and perception, landscape and wilderness, the limits of experience, and the nature of human being. With a surreal blend of emotions and memories, A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat portrays a complex and ever-shifting landscape of possibilities. The author passionately reveals a finely wrought sensibility, which elevates the subtle scenery of life's everyday events.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Canadian Aboriginal Voices series.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Translated by Donald Winkler 

 An Honest Woman by Jonina Kirton confronts us with beauty and ugliness in the wholesome riot that is sex, love, and marriage. From the perspective of a mixed-race woman, Kirton engages with Simone de Beauvoir and Donald Trump to unravel the norms of femininity and sexuality that continue to adhere today.

Kirton recalls her own upbringing, during which she was told to find a good husband who would “make an honest woman” out of her. Exploring the lives of many women, including her mother, her contemporaries, and well-known sex-crime stories such as the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, Kirton mines the personal to loosen the grip of patriarchal and colonial impositions. 

An Honest Woman explores the many ways the female body is shaped by questions that have been too political to ask: What happens when a woman decides to take her sexuality into her own hands, dismissing cultural norms and the expectations of her parents? How is a young woman’s sexuality influenced when she is perceived as an “exotic” other? Can a woman reconnect with her Indigenous community by choosing Indigenous lovers? 

Daring and tender in their honesty and wisdom, these poems challenge the perception of women’s bodies as glamorous and marketable commodities and imagine an embodied female experience that accommodates the role of creativity and a nurturing relationship with the land.

Reviews
“Jonina Kirton is courageously honest about her life experiences as a female of Indigenous and immigrant ancestry. Many poems resonate deeply, as we identify with her personal quest to figure out who she is, and the unacceptable things done to her. Her raw honesty is unsettling and uncomfortable, because it can be our truth too. Her poems depict devaluation and dehumanization, grieving, lessons learned. Her poems offer important insights as to why there are thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women.” — Senator Lillian E. Dyck

“When writing from the voice of between, writer and reader have no place to hide. Assumptions and camouflage fall away. Murdered, missing, and violated women and girl voices have been silenced. The story lethally repeats. Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene. Too, she affirms, ‘I have been here forever and I will rise again and again.’ Tough, eloquent, revelatory, these poems are the very ones we are desperately in need of.” — Betsy Warland, author of Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas

“I’m sure people have been looking at me strangely every time I gasp, but I can’t glance away from the page for even a second to notice. Some of the poems end sharply, with a punch; some deliberately leave me searching for the next line; others show the repetition of heartbreaking cycles of violence and oppression, but offer a portrayal of resilience, too.” — All Lit Up!

Educator Information
This book would be useful for Women's Studies, Creative Writing, English Language Arts, Poetry, and English courses.  Recommended for grades 11-12 and university-college students.  

Please be advised, this book contains explicit sexual references and references to sexual and physical abuse.

Additional Information
104 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"