Poetry

Slow Scrape enacts a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Drawing on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts, the book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowing. In the words of Layli Long Soldier, Slow Scrape presents “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin, and colonization."

Includes an introduction by Layli Long Soldier as well as a dialogue between Lukin Linklater and editor for the first edition, Michael Nardone.

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112 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Standing in a River of Time merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Métis family. Kirton does not shy away from hard realities, meeting them head on, but always treating them with respect and the love stemming from a lifetime of spiritual healing and decades of sobriety. This collection unravels painful memories and a mixed-blood woman’s journey towards wholeness. The Ancestors whisper to Kirton throughout, asking her to heal, to bring them home, so that within these stories of redemption and loss the dead walk with us, their presence felt as the story unfurls in unexpected ways. Kirton does not offer false hope, nor does she push us towards answers we are not yet ready for. Instead, she gestures towards the many healing modalities she has explored as she discovers that the path to reconciliation is not only a long and winding road, but also that it begins with those closest to us.

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192 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

When Carol Rose GoldenEagle was a child, attending Easter church services, she recalls the annual ritual of the priest presenting plaques depicting the stages of Christ's persecution to his resurrection, referred to as the "stations of the cross". Using these early teachings as a springboard for critical reflections, poems look back, but more importantly, look forward to reclaiming the gifts given by Creator within Indigenous culture. GoldenEagle's searing new poetry collection examines the dark legacy of the residential school system, church and government doctrine, and the ongoing impacts on Indigenous peoples' lives across Turtle Island.

Reviews
"Written with power and grace, Stations of the Crossed tells the story of 'doors marked in blood' from the point-of-view of a Sixties Scoop survivor, honouring those who 'survive because they have learned how.' If this book makes you cry, let it. These poems of blood-memory and soul, heartbreaking police brutality, and misconducts of the system have strength, humility, and wisdom, and are urgent reading for anyone interested in reconciliation."—Yasuko Thanh, author, Mistakes To Run With

"Stations of the Crossed takes apart this county's long history of trying to extinguish Indigenous culture, and the legacy of colonialism. Carol Rose GoldenEagle's own experience as a child of the Sixties Scoop is direct and especially moving. She replaces the Old Testament justifications with her own memories and reflections on community, and the ethical teachings and ways of being in Indigenous culture. It's been said if we only have one story, that's the story we become. This is a book about finding that new path, and the kind of story we need now-a true one."-Bruce Rice, author of The Vivian Poems: The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier

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100 pages | 6.00" x 7.50" | Paperback

The Big Melt is a debut poetry collection rooted in nehiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. It examines what it means to repair kinship, contend with fraught history, go home and contemplate prairie ndn utopia in the era of late capitalism and climate change. Part memoir, part research project, this collection draws on Riddle’s experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. This book refuses a linear understanding of time in its focus on women in the author’s family, some who have passed and others who are yet to come. The Big Melt is about inheriting a Treaty relationship just as much as it is about breakups, demonstrating that governance is just as much about our interpersonal relationships as it is law and policy. How does one live one’s life in a way that honours inherited responsibilities, a deep love for humour and a commitment to always learning about the tension between a culture that deeply values collectivity and the autonomy of the individual? Perhaps we find these answers in the examination of ourselves, the lands we are from and the relationships we hold.

Awards

• 2023 Indigenous Voices Awards Co-Winner for Published Poetry in English

Reviews
"Gentle, firm and funny, Emily Riddle uses The Big Melt to Aunty us all. This radically personal debut, like an iceberg or crater on the moon, reaches deep down into history—political, familial, environmental, romantical—to make sense of what it means to be an ndn on the prairies today who understands that the Oilers and West Edmonton Mall and miniskirts are sacred, and that this “bootlegging operation called Canada” can’t stop telling lies. There are truths here for us; the immense research behind the text feels like a lifetime labour of love, done out of necessity to reconcile loss and fashion some comfort in the face of colonial violence. What a gift it is for Riddle to show us, with clarity and wit, how fierce friendship and unshakeable matriarchs have helped her to connect with her ancestors, nehiyaw askiy, and herself." — Molly Cross-Blanchard, August 2022

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112 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

the tales are of loss and forgiveness
and they fill the room

The Punishment is the latest addition to the oeuvre of prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand, whose stunning previous collection, The East Side of It All, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

In The Punishment, Joseph Dandurand's now-familiar storyteller's voice wrangles trauma, grief, forgiveness and love. His poems illustrate the poet's solitary existence. With scenes of residential school, the psych ward, the streets and the river, Dandurand reveals an arduous journey: one poet's need to both understand his life and find ways to escape it. Through poetry, he shares with us all his lovers. He shares the streets. He shares what he sees: the great eagles and small birds; his culture and teachings; the East Side; self-pity; the deception of love; the deception of hate; sasquatches; spirits; and his people, the Kwantlen.

At root, The Punishment is about survival. Dandurand's poems will show you disease. They'll show you cedar. They'll show you music. They'll show you shadows. They'll show you forgiveness, and they'll show you punishment.

Reviews
"Hands down, Joseph Dandurand is one of my all-time favourite writers ... Good Lord―what a voice!" — Richard Van Camp,

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144 pages | 5.50" x 8.00" | Paperback

From epic ventures into mythic and fantastical tales to the everyday trials of getting the laundry done, NShannacappo’s debut poetry collection follows many journeys through darkness to hope, healing and heroism. Pure and hauntingly beautiful turns of phrase sound out in the voices of angels, monsters and demons, mythic characters, and the sometimes wry, sometimes grieving voice of a man once broken in heart, spirit, and mind. Through the Eyes of Asunder begins and ends with hope, and takes the reader through sorrow and sadness to bright moments of happiness and love.

Reviews
“Neal Shannacappo is a spiritual thinker. The poetry and life’s perspectives he shares in this collation remind us of the unconditional love and support one can access through the Creator-given learning ways we as human beings are blessed to be born with. Read his words! Feed them to your heart, digest them spiritually and you will benefit from the medicine intended in every word and stanza.”—Albert Dumont, 2021–2022 Poet Laureate for Ottawa and author of Sitting by the Rapids.

“Reading this book, it felt many times like I had stumbled upon a shoebox filled with letters not sent and journals put away for safekeeping. You feel like you shouldn’t pry, but you just can’t help yourself. It was a wonderful read.”—John Brady McDonald, author of KITOTAM

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143 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 6 illustrations | Paperback

The poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community--a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from.

These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice--how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything--an entire cross-section of lived experience--written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words' embrace. Dion-Glowa's poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.

Reviews
"Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight." — Sachiko Murakami, author of Render

"As I read this work, I was taken back, time and again, to those days when I was a young street poet who had so much to say at a time where it felt like no one was listening. There are many times when sentiment needs to be expressed in the most bold and unapologetic way it can, and the brashness and frank delivery found in this work is the hallmark of a collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed. These are not exploitative poems, nor are they the Victim Impact Statement of a wounded spirit. This collection is the chronicle of an eyewitness to reality, without compromise." — John Brady McDonald, Nehiyawak-Metis poet and artist, author of Kitotam

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96 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback

A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet.

Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her “warm, oracular voice” (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks “from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR). Her poems are musical, intimate, political, and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love.

In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo’s “poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times” (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).

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144 pages | 5.65" x 8.53" | Hardcover 

A “kunik” is a traditional Inuit greeting, often given to loved ones, in which a person places their nose on another’s cheek and breathes them in. Where the Sea Kuniks the Land extends that gesture of love to the Arctic landscape, in a suite of poems that celebrates the interconnectedness of people and place, past and present.

The importance of land, culture, and identity play key roles in these poems, and the collection will move readers to think deeply about colonization, intergenerational trauma, and grief.

This collection paints beautiful pictures of Arctic landscapes, love stories, and growth. It will take readers on a journey through the seasons, from fierce snowstorms to a warm field of Labrador tea flowers.

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80 pages | 7.00" x 9.25" | Paperback

An Indigenous resistance historiography, poetry that interrogates the colonial violence of the archive

Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in people’s lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.

Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.

Awards

• 2023 Indigenous Voices Awards Co-Winner: Published Poetry in English

Additional Information
144 pages | 5.75" x 8.50" | Paperback

In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet's classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: "I was made in someone else's home," he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness. Depicting his ancestors as wolves--symbols of survival and protection--LaRose brings fresh insight to his wider poetic project: castigating the inequality, greed, and racism inherent to colonialism.

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80 pages | 5.00" x 7.50" | Paperback

Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future.

In Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, celebrated poets and activists pay homage to the ghosts of lost forests and issue a rallying cry to protect remaining ancient giants and restore uncolonized spaces.

Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and protection are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets, several of whom have attended the recent Fairy Creek blockades and still others who defended BC's old growth trees in Clayoquot Sound nearly 30 years ago.

Contributors include ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, GG winner Arleen Paré, Canadian icon bill bissett, Griffin Poetry Prize winner Eve Joseph, ReLit Award winner Patrick Friesen, Joy Kogawa, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Harold Rhenisch, Jay Ruzesky, John Barton, Kate Braid, Kim Trainor, Kim Goldberg, Pamela Porter, Patricia and Terence Young, Russell Thornton, Sonnet L’Abbé, Susan McCaslin, Susan Musgrave, Tom Wayman, Trevor Carolan, Yvonne Blomer, Zoe Dickinson and the late Pat Lowther.

Reviews
"This anthology grounds us in the earth's daily miracles, also known as trees, reminding us not to take them for granted. These poems acknowledge how we rely on and are part of a life force much bigger and wiser than us, giving us glimpses into the sacredness that trees make as they unconditionally transform sunlight into 'nourishing air.' From love to grief to gratitude to awe, this collection gives us lessons in the language of trees, crucial lexicons with which to navigate climate emergency." -Rita Wong, activist-poet, author of Current, Climate: The Poetry of Rita Wong

"In this eclectic grove of poems written and gathered on the body of trees, poets inflect, root, bend towards the mythopoetic, listening with love to arboreality, walking the path towards tree immersion. 'Make no mistake, I saw them relax their limbs and droop. Settling into their dreams.' A language that will always mystify and sustain us. Enjoy this collection and touch wood. 'tree, tell me what have you done with death.' 'today i ate chainsaws for breakfast.'" -Mona Fertig, editor of Love of the Salish Sea Islands and 111 West Coast Literary Portraits

"The tree is in the midst of an intellectual renaissance, judging by all the books on the lifeways, politics and communicative tendencies of networked forests. But poets have always been a People of the Tree, and the arboreal fund gathered in Worth More Standing covers the roots and branches of the entwined process of 'becoming both human and tree.' Our fate and the fate of forests have never been more entangled. This is a gorgeous and necessary collection, to be returned to again and again."-Governor General's Award-nominated poet Stephen Collis

"A masterpiece in cultural diversity unified with a call to action, Worth More Standing is a celebratory awakening to all Earth Citizens to see trees as far more valuable than in board feet of lumber. Our unified purpose must be to honour the old growth as we would our ancestors. Such forests and trees have been with us as long as we have been human. Their destruction means the loss of an essential component of our humanity." -Paul Stamets, award-winning mycologist, author, and bee protector

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240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback 

Authenticity Note: Not all of this work's contributors are Indigenous.

You Might Be Sorry You Read This is a stunning debut, revealing how breaking silences and reconciling identity can refine anger into something both useful and beautiful. A poetic memoir that looks unflinchingly at childhood trauma (both incestuous rape and surviving exposure in extreme cold), it also tells the story of coming to terms with a hidden Indigenous identity when the poet discovered her Métis heritage at age 38. This collection is a journey of pain, belonging, hope, and resilience. The confessional poems are polished yet unpretentious, often edgy but humorous; they explore trauma yet prioritize the poet’s story. Honouring the complexities of Indigenous identity and the raw experiences of womanhood, mental illness, and queer selfhood, these narratives carry weight. They tell us “You need / only be the simple / expression of the divine / intent / that is your life.” There is a lifetime in these poems.

Reviews
"Michelle Poirier Brown’s first collection of poetry is accomplished and gripping. In her five-decade story, perceptions, denial, emotional embroilments and poignant tenderness are peeled back and examined. As the narrative builds, we encounter the sheer alchemical power of poetry. This is rare. You Might Be Sorry You Read This will change you." — Betsy Warland, Bloodroot—Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss

“One of the functions of poetry is to make you uncomfortable.” This epigraph, by Pádraig Ó Tuama, begins Michelle Poirier Brown’s debut collection—a collection that intends, unapologetically, to discomfort the reader. With unflinching precision and the exactness of a fine poet’s eye, Poirier Brown challenges her readers to encounter not only her childhood trauma but, ultimately, the power of her self—her late-discovered Métis identity, her navigation of PTSD, her unwillingness to settle for less than the truth. In the final poem, “Self-Portrait of the Poet,” she concludes, “go ahead. look. / Look as long as you like.” Invitation or command, it’s a hard look Poirier Brown offers. It may make readers uncomfortable. But they won’t be sorry.” —Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust

Educator Information
Keywords / Themes: Identity, Trauma, Pain, Resilience, Family, Métis, Indigenous.

Table of Contents

1 The Father I Had
3 God Was a Baby
4 A Child’s Book of Holy Services
6 Her Breath on My Face
8 Other Side of the Glass
10 Effect on Her Throat
11 The House on Strathnaver Avenue
15 Mothers Who Know
16 The Thing About Snow
22 Photograph
23 Under the Covers
25 The Girls I Grew Up With Are Everywhere
27 Short Change
28 After the Test
29 Walk on the Left-Hand Side
30 5:53 PM
32 A Perspective on Women
33 Collard Greens
34 Lasts
36 I’m Allowed to Have Whatever Kind of Father I Want
38 Intimacy
39 On the Porch
41 At Times, My Teeth Chatter
about face
46 What It’s Like to Have My Face
47 Understanding My Face
52 Wake
54 A Fragile Defiance
55 Smoke
57 Winnipeg Trip
59 Commitment
61 Two Mornings, 2018
63 Boxed
64 Those I Call Friends
66 Duck Ugly
67 Beneficiaries of a Genocide
69 Slow
70 Sometimes You Learn Things Quite Late in the Game
72 Something Purple
75 what it is like to be this extreme and appear normal
78 The Other Grandmother
80 Self-Portrait of the Poet
83 addendum
87 poetic statement
90 acknowledgements

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

J. R. Bull’s debut poetry book, (h)in(d)sight 2020, is the first in the Spir(itu)al Connection Collection. Julie’s lyrical and whimsical use of language provides ponderings for readers as they are taken on a journey of self-discovery. Part - memoir, manifesto, and musings, (h)in(d)sight 2020 is an inward journey and an outward Call to Action. A heart and soul voyage toward decolonization of the mind. Challenging the status quo and perceived societal norms, (h)in(d)sight 2020 demonstrates moving forward, together.

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58 Pages | Paperback

Geronimo is probably the second-best-known Indigenous name, after Pocahontas. But the reality of the great Apache warrior's fate is little remembered. In At Geronimo's Grave, Armand Garnet Ruffo uses the Apache warrior's life as a metaphor for the lives of many of the abandoned Indigenous people on this continent. With affection and concern, award-winning poet Armand Garnet Ruffo uses straightforward language to examine the lives and experiences of people who struggle to make their way in a world that has no place for them, starting with Geronimo himself. Feared for his once-great prowess, the warrior horseman was reduced to wearing a top hat and riding in an early Ford Model T car, a grim caricature of assimilation into the dominant culture. The bitter irony of this fate echoes through the personal poems in At Geronimo's Grave. This collection is a love letter to a people trapped in the slow-moving vehicle of another culture that is taking them nowhere.

Reviews
"Armand Ruffo spins silky songs out of everyday language. They thread the separations between the dead and the living, between the heirs of Columbus and his 'Indians,' between families and their children, joining the awkward edges always with hope, often with beauty." – Daniel David Moses

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116 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback