Bøger af Marie-Andrée Gill

Winner of the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Best Published Poetry in FrenchYou're the clump of blackened sprucethat lights my gasoline-soaked heart It's just impossible you won't be backto quench yourself in my crème-sodaancestral spiritIrreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in Gill's interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate her interior landscape--of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light--amidst the boreal geography.Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Québécoise woman.

Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andree Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "e;take the edge off,"e; for a "e;habitable word,"e; for sex. For her "e;true north"e;her voice and her identity.Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "e;make of herself"e;.