Poetry

A gender-fluid trickster character leaps from Cree stories to inhabit this raucous and rebellious new work by award-winning poet Louise Bernice Halfe.

There are no pronouns in Cree for gender; awâsis (which means illuminated child) reveals herself through shapeshifting, adopting different genders, exploring the English language with merriment, and sharing his journey of mishaps with humor, mystery, and spirituality. Opening with a joyful and intimate Foreword from Elder Maria Campbell, awâsis – kinky and dishevelled is a force of Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and soul-healing laughter.

If you’ve read Halfe’s previous books, prepared to be surprised by this one. Raging in the dark, uncovering the painful facts wrought on her and her people’s lives by colonialism, racism, religion, and residential schools, she has walked us through raw realities with unabashed courage and intense, precise lyricism. But for her fifth book, another choice presented itself. Would she carve her way with determined ferocity into the still-powerful destructive forces of colonialism, despite Canada’s official, hollow promises to make things better? After a soul-searching Truth and Reconciliation process, the drinking water still hasn’t improved, and Louise began to wonder whether inspiration had deserted her.

Then awâsis showed up—a trickster, teacher, healer, wheeler-dealer, shapeshifter, woman, man, nuisance, inspiration. A Holy Fool with their fly open, speaking Cree, awâsis came to Louise out of the ancient stories of her people, from the quiet words of the Elders, from community input through tears and laughter, from her own aching heart and her three-dimensional dreams. Following awâsis’s lead, Louise has flipped her blanket over, revealing a joking, mischievous, unapologetic alter ego—right on time.

Reviews
“There really isn’t any template for telling stories as experienced from within Indigenous minds. In her book awâsis – kinky and dishevelled, Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe (Sky Dancer) presents a whole new way to experience story poems. It’s kinda like she writes in English but thinks in Cree. Lovely, revealing, funny, stunning. A whole new way to write!” — Buffy Sainte-Marie

“Louise Halfe knows, without question, how to make miyo-iskotêw, a beautiful fire with her kindling of words and moss gathered from a sacred place known only to her, to the Old Ones. These poems, sharp and crackling, are among one of the most beautiful fires I’ve ever sat beside.” — Gregory Scofield, author of Witness, I Am

“Louise makes awâsis out of irreverent sacred text. The darkness enlightens. She uses humor as a scalpel and sometimes as a butcher knife, to cut away, or hack off, our hurts, our pain, our grief and our traumas. In the end we laugh and laugh and laugh.” — Harold R. Johnson, author of Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada

“This is all about Indigenizing and reconciliation among ourselves. It’s the kind of funny, shake up, poking, smacking, and farting we all need while laughing our guts out. It’s beautiful, gentle and loving.” — Marie Campbell, author of Halfbreed (from the Foreword)

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104 pages | 5.75" x 8.50"

The voices of Blue Marrow sing out from the past and the present. They are the voices of the Grandmothers, both personal and legendary. They share their wisdom, their lives, their dreams. They proclaim the injustice of colonialism, the violence of proselytism, and the horrors of the residential school system with an honesty that cuts to the marrow. Speaking in both English and Cree, these are voices of hopefulness, strength, and survivance. Blue Marrow is a tribute to the indomitable power of Indigenous women of the past and of the present day.

Educator Information
This is the 3rd Edition of this book.  More than twenty years since its first publication, this critically acclaimed collection is available in a redesigned edition, including an all-new interview with its celebrated author, Louise B. Halfe - Sky Dancer.

Some of the text is written in Cree.

Additional Information
120 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | paperback | 8 illustrations

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

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

the Cree word for constellation

is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime

the translation for policeman

in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs

the translation for genius

in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep

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

niece’s cracked lips spilling out

broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin in between

the gaps in her teeth 

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

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

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

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128 pages | 5.50" x 8.00"

The highly anticipated debut poetry collection of Mi'kmaq poems by Prince Edward Island's Poet Laureate, Julie Pellisier-Lush.

This collection will enthrall poetry lovers. Skilled at taking words from hearts and minds to paper, Julie's poems will connect with the reader deeply. Some poems were created with teachings from our Elders and some were created to learn more about the art of words.

At times heart wrenching and other times a call to action for Mother Earth, each poignant poem is paired with vivid artwork crafted by the poet herself.

Take what you like, use what you need, most of all enjoy.

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96 pages | 5.50" x 9.00" | Paperback

There are times in a parent's life when they ask why am I doing this? It's so hard. That is, until those occasions of magic happen, and they always do. Parenthood is a journey with no road map. And it is the children who most often steer the ship. In her new collection of poetry, Essential Ingredients, Carol Rose GoldenEagle recalls when Creator's blessings have truly been bestowed in a parent's shared life with their children. Poems examine hardship and struggle, triumph of spirit and joy, and serve as a reminder to all parents that childhood is fleeting. This beautiful volume is a celebration of parenthood, in the form of love letters to the poet's children. It is ultimately a tribute to the memories of those many magic moments which define love, purpose and pride.

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100 pages | 6.00" x 7.50" | Paperback

This stellar debut collection by Métis poet Diana Hope Tegenkamp takes us through many worlds and wonders. In Girl running, we find solace and outrage, grief and tenderness, bewilderment and beauty, all “entangled in hope and dreaming.” The poet’s love of the natural world is both earthy and adamantine, and her passion for literature and art is just as rich a source for her questioning eye.

On the edge of Saskatoon, a woman opens a car door and flees. A child runs away from residential school after a beating. A Métis man’s ghost gallops on a ghost horse across the prairies. Henry James’ 19th-century heroine, Isabel Archer, runs across a wintery yard. Lana Tisdel drives away from Falls City, Nebraska, after the murder of her transgender boyfriend.

After many losses—of a mother known and loved, of a Métis father unknown and imagined—the ‘girl’ of this collection is running towards and away from mortality. In these poems, disappearances, perpetual flights, river walks, shadowy descents and miraculous returns connect daily living and mortality, current social realities and ancient histories, the surface and the subterranean depths of our complicated lives. Lovers of contemporary Canadian poetry will find that this textured collection rewards reading and rereading.

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120 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Go Down Odawa Way is a poetry collection that explores the physical, historical, and cultural spaces that make up the southwestern traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy. This is the region currently inhabited by southwestern Ontario and southeastern Michigan. Individual poems and sections of this collection explore the documented villages, history, and mythologies of the Odawa, Ojibway, Huron/Wendat, and Pottawatomi nations that were lost to the process of colonization and relocation. The project speaks to the history of the region that predates contemporary Canadian and American borders and namings as well as carves out a history that extends back past the mere couple of centuries of European colonization. The narrative focal point of the pieces find their roots in the traditional Lenape vantage point of the author and seeks to draw on the experiences of a modern day urban Indian in connection with the manner that land has changed with non-Indigenous settlement and those that inhabit it.

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76 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | Paperback

Iskotew Iskwew/Fire Woman is a poetry collection written during a period of trauma while the author was working as a Counsel to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2017. This book is about memories and experiences growing up on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in northern Saskatchewan in the 1980s: summers spent on the land and the pain of residential school. With this collection, the author wants to teach and inform Canadians of her experiences growing up as an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. She believes it is important to share her stories for others to read.

Additional Information
104 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

The Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word "Kitotam" translates into English as, "He Speaks to It." This is a collection of free-verse poetry by Indigenous poet and artist John McDonald. Written in two parts, these poems chronicle John's life and experiences as an urban Indigenous youth during the 1980s. The second half of the book is a look into the inspirations and events, that shaped John's career as an internationally known spoken word artist, beat poet, monologist and performance artist.

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88 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

I have to believe my account will outpace its ending.

The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard’s daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow’s humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten.

Reviews
“Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos stands as yet another masterpiece of orality and temporality in the blossoming oeuvre that is her poetic arena. We traverse through webbed histories, a multiplicity of singing bodies: human, non-human, father, lover, lake, land, galactic. Howard’s ability to unearth creation and trickster from beneath the rubble of canonic and catatonic poetics is a miracle in the making. It is no surprise to be met with yet again grace and fury in Letters in a Bruised Cosmos—as Howard has demonstrated time and time again, she is a divining starwalker of a poet.” —Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
 
“In Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Liz Howard makes sentences with the elegance and mystery of a sculptor. Howard’s aesthetic mode is a beautiful synthesis of feminist, anti-colonial, and post-structural traditions of critique and re-imagination that is singularly hers. I read each poem with the faith that I would land somewhere I couldn’t have known existed until I opened this book. That’s the mark of poetic genius. I loved this book with my whole body.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body

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80 pages | 5.75" x 8.50"

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

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192 pages | 6.43" x 8.62"

A celebratory, slyly funny, and bluntly honest take on sex and romance in NDN Country.

nedi nezu (Good Medicine) explores the beautiful space that being a sensual Indigenous woman creates - not only as a partner, a fantasy, a heartbreak waiting to happen but also as an auntie, a role model, a voice that connects to others walking the same path. From the online hookup world of DMs, double taps, and secret texts to earth-shakingly erotic encounters under the northern stars to the ever-complicated relationship Indigenous women have with mainstream society, this poetry collection doesn't shy away from depicting the gorgeous diversity in decolonized desire. Instead, Campbell creates the most intimate of spaces, where the tea is hot and a seat is waiting, surrounded by the tantalizing laughter of aunties telling stories.

These wise, jubilant poems chronicle many failed attempts at romance, with the wry humour needed to not take these heartbreaks personally, and the growth that comes from sitting in the silence of living a solo life in a world that insists everyone should be partnered up. With a knowing smile, this book side-eyes the political existence and celebrates the lived experience of an Indigenous woman falling in love and lust with those around her -but, most importantly, with herself.

nedi nezu is a smart, sensual, and scandalous collection dripping in Indigenous culture yet irresistible to anyone in thrall to the magnificent disaster that is dating, sex, and relationships.

Reviews
"Since I was hit on by someone using lines from #IndianLovePoems and immediately went out to buy it, I've been eagerly waiting for Tenille K. Campbell's next collection. What a joy and a blessing to find myself in pages as intimate as staying up late with your best friend sharing truths, as hot as meeting your next lover's gaze, and as sharp as a mean auntie. nedi nezu cements Campbell's reputation as the matriarch of decolonized desire." -Eden Robinson, author of Trickster Drift

"There are many kinds of intimacy in Tenille Campbell's delicious second collection: that of laughing lovers entangled in damp sheets under the star-strewn northern sky; that of a Dene/Metis woman dreaming her relations with the living land, its histories, and its futures; that of a formidably talented woman in all her complex contexts - poet, scholar, mother, lover - who shifts with ease between evocations of knee-trembling desire, wry humour, tender kindness, and aching loneliness. The poems are a love-language that honours the messy, meaningful complexities of sensual self-determination, the fierce assertion of an Indigenous woman's embodied and visionary power. We are lucky indeed to have the restorative gift of Campbell's work in this ever more alienating world. Read it, share it, be transformed." -Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

"Dare we all have such an opportunity to revel in the intimate oratories of Tenille K. Campbell's matriarchy. She asks us to 'know that we are in ceremony' as she undertakes an album of sensual and sexual vignettes rinsed clean of seeds in gentle spring waters. Alternatively, she interrogates fatphobia, Indigenous masculinities, academia, heteropatriarchy, and untangles the ways in which poetry hinges on the pervasive in the stratosphere of social media. Campbell shows us yet again why Indigeneity is wholly and irrevocably erotic by nature." -Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

Educator Information
Caution: Mature language. 

Additional Information
92 pages | 6.00" x 8.00"

Named after a local word meaning “soaked through” or “weighed down,” Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Megan Gail Coles’s debut poetry collection, Satched, is a vivid portrait of intergenerational trauma, ecological grief, and late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a woman of rural-remote, Northern, working class, mixed ancestry.

Honest, penetrating, and often darkly comic, these poems explore the extraordinary will it requires to stay alive in the face of economic precariousness, growing inequality, and prevailing dissatisfaction. With a fierce dedication to place, the collection explores the conflict inherent to individualistic priorities and collective needs present in a hyper-commodified Newfoundland and Labrador. Satched demands compassionate advocacy for all as it resolutely strives for clarity and acceptance while celebrating the momentary glimpses of joy in the path toward shared values and resilience.

Reviews
“This collection trills of the [Newfoundland] region and its distinct speech … Coles creates an intimacy in Satched through her urban maritime lens and straightforward style.” — Quill & Quire

“Reading Satched is like drinking chilled wine with an old friend on a hot night, commiserating with love, gratitude, and mutual affection. It’s opening a second bottle, letting the kids fall asleep watching movies, and getting out the hidden cigarettes to really get into it. It’s a fist in the air before it’s aimed at an appropriate eyeball. It’s an exceptional accomplishment full of lyrical strength and poetic endurance.” — Katherena Vermette, author of river woman

“Are you ready for poems that pierce straight to the bone? Megan Gail Coles’s Satched is a razor edge of fierce truth, grim humour, and unalloyed beauty. With sharp-eyed clarity and fearless candour, Coles slices open the veils of capitalism and colonization to reveal a landscape marked by poverty and resilience, violence, and hope. This is Newfoundland and Labrador seen through the eyes of unconditional love and furious rage. The political, the personal, and the poetic interweave seamlessly in this debut collection, adding another genre to Coles’s already impressive repertoire. Satched is the kind of book we need right now, the kind that confronts the real world head-on while also teaching us how to live in it.” — Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland

“Satched is an acerbic, bold, and wise debut that susses out the subtle and sinister ways men infringe on women’s mental and physical spaces, the horrors of the climate crisis, and the pitfalls of economic precarity. With technical mastery and an immediately infectious tone, Coles inhabits the voices of Atlantic Canada, unearths the ways grief inhabits a place, and interrogates prevailing notions of resiliency. Coles intimates both how ‘our minds are poisoned against ourselves’ and the ways in which kinship offers a path to forge through the audaciousness of capital and insidiousness of colonialism. Reading Satched is like talking to your smartest, funniest friend, who wryly declares, ‘there is nothing and no one standing in your way, / except capitalism and global pandemics.’” — Cassidy McFadzean, author of Drolleries

“These poems tumble into me with a rage and beauty that is oceanic. I am satched to the core. Megan Gail Coles writes poems that ask us to reconsider historical and contemporary attitudes toward poverty, race, gender, and the environment, engaging her reader in ‘this present rowing over the past / to make up the future.’ Because while these poems speak deeply to intergenerational trauma, solastalgia, and the systemic ills of capitalism hidden in plain sight, they are forward-looking at heart. Satched puts forth that despite (or perhaps because of) our human frailties, we can begin again. These poems demonstrate that repair is possible, even from a rusty scaffold, if we are willing to reach beyond ourselves.” — Clea Roberts, author of Auguries

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

Selina Boan’s debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan’s poems emphasize sound and breath. They tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through nêhiyawêwin.

As a settler and urban nehiyaw who grew up disconnected from her father’s family and community, Boan turns to language as one way to challenge the impact of assimilation policies and colonization on her own being and the landscapes she inhabits. Exploring the nexus of language and power, the effects of which are both far-reaching and deeply intimate, these poems consider the ways language impacts the way we view and construct the world around us. Boan also explores what it means to be a white settler–nehiyaw woman actively building community and working to ground herself through language and relationships. Boan writes from a place of linguistic tension, tenderness and care, creating space to ask questions and to imagine intimate decolonial futures.

Awards

• 2022 Indigenous Voices Award for published poetry in English.

Reviews
"Reading Undoing Hours feels like going home, where home, much like memory, is a place continually under construction. This is a work at once exquisite and particular in its offering while at the same time striking us as expansive, prepossessing and true." — Liz Howard

"Selina Boan’s Undoing Hours is going to be so very important to those who are “learning to name” inside multiple languages. It is about embodying the knowledge of one’s ancestry as well as about love as it collides with grief and longing and hope. It is about standing firmly inside a single hour and being brave enough to want another. It is about learning Cree, about how a word in a language older than the world might, in the end, redeem us. And because of this, it is also about miracles. I can’t wait to read it again and again and again." — Billy-Ray Belcourt

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.00"

Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness. Bones, Tyler Pennock's wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poem's journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach. At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero's journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers.

Reviews
"Here is a spare and urgent voice that speaks of 'wounds and beauty,' that gestures to a story of trauma and abuse while offering us a potent journey of self-reckoning and reclamation. Bones entwines brutality with the deepest tenderness and in its clear-eyed way asks us, as poetry must, to re-see the world." --Catherine Bush, author of Accusation and The Rules of Engagement

"Tyler Pennock's poetry unfurls like breath: measured, light, caught, whispering, and vital. It charts memory with a steady hand and unerring allegiance to locating the 'beauty/in terrible things.' Bones addresses the effects of intergenerational, state-sponsored trauma with enviable grace, inscribing and affirming life on the other side of overwhelming pain, abuse, and grief. It carries on, resilient, defiant, gazing at the stars, one breath at a time." --Laurie D. Graham, author of Settler Education

"Tyler Pennock's Bones is a soft meandering through the memories of the narrator's hearthome: a place in which trauma, kinship, abuse, and nostalgia cradle one another in a circle. Here, poetics are deployed to inspect the most minute of objects with such wild abandon that the narrator transplants us into a world rife with sharpness so as to make the image complete, focussed, lifelike, photographic even as he continually 'wish[es he] were like water'. Here we find memory and dream animated in equal measure: two spirits sitting in a basement, a headless mother, a white bear, wihtiko, and a sister slowly vanishing. Lyrical, witty, heart-wrenching, and empowering, Pennock's debut book of poetry is a contemplative epic asking us to ponder the ethics of remembrance in all of its lacings of razing and revitalization." --Joshua Whitehead, author of Full-Metal Indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed

Additional Information
104 pages | 6.00" x 8.75"