Lyric memoir. By a queer Cree poet, writer, scholar. Intense, compelling. Memory, poetry, theory, love, lust, rage, grief, joy, opacity, play. Keenly situated in the painful space between worlds violently unmade and worlds straining to grow. As is often true with this kind of book, I feel a pull to find a “right way” to read it, which I think is just another version of the white (and Canadian) urge to race towards innocence, so I try to sit in the fragmentary whirlwind of delight in language, of not understanding, of being swept to and fro by furious critique, of momentary shattering of certainties, of feeling like I understand but knowing I probably don’t, of constant return to the long ache of living in a world built on violence (even despite being more beneficiary than target), of amazement at the worlds dreamt and spawned and made that pull towards the possibility, however unlikely it might sometimes seem, of better tomorrows.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.