Collection’s connections nourish narrator

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This article was published 23/12/2023 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The title of Samantha Nock’s debut, A Family of Dreamers (Talonbooks, 112 pages, $19), is connected to the speaker’s grief over the loss of her grandparents and the intergenerational trauma suffered by her family and community: “last week grandma on the farm took the same/ journey as grandpa./ a nightmare greets me every night and/ i wonder how many days i can stay awake.// kokum says we come from a family of/ dreamers.”

In this collection, Nock’s conversational cadence invites the reader to witness a practice of tender and truthful regard between the speaker and her ancestors, her community and herself. “sam, m’girl,” she opens the collection, “remember they don’t understand/ what it’s like to live in this body// [… .]// please remember/ that you’re not just a house/ built of grief.”

For all the speaker doesn’t look away from grief and trauma, these take place against a background of connection over meals, card games or reruns of All My Children, and one of the themes is the way the speaker is nourished by these connections. In give ‘em hell, iskwew, the speaker’s kokum’s purse contains “no pressure to perform/ expectations handed down from introduced/ standards,” and, indeed, that “Lori, i think kokum has room/ in her purse for all of us.”

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In her latest collection, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People (Invisible Publishing, 80 pages, $23), Cara-Lyn Morgan considers what is required to break an intergenerational pattern of abuse. In You are the end, the speaker addresses her unborn daughter, promising that “I must never give you/ all I had.” The collection, structured around the speaker’s pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, enacts a ceremony of resistance and healing.

Morgan opens the collection with a depiction of familial sexual abuse and the enforced silence that surrounds this open secret: “An aunt tells me/ it’s something/ that happens when you are a child/ and you have to move on.” Here, with the starkness of the short line and emotionally uninflected diction, Morgan conveys the weight and momentum of the cycle the speaker must counteract.

Essential to the speaker’s commitment to healing is the witness she bears to the connection between the way children in her family are treated and Canada’s history of Indigenous genocide. In addition, Morgan connects the speaker’s commitment to protecting her daughter to Indigenous resistance: “These are empty stories/ of our past, cages for you — like Batoche, Duck Lake —/ all the places perhaps/ you’ll return to.”

While in this poem she refers to the bones as “a poor gift,” bones are, in this collection, symbols of protection and nurturance. From the speaker’s injunction in “I give you my bones” to “Do with them/ what you must” to her final vision as her daughter is born, where “I felt/ the old bones clatter around// my paralyzed limbs. I gathered/ them tight to build her a place/ where she could scream herself wild,” bones connect the speaker to ancestral survival and the urge to do right by future generations.

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In The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 144 pages, $39), American poet Nicole Sealey uses erasure to intervene in the official report that followed the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Miss.

This intervention centres Black people’s lives and their relations to state power. “At gunpoint, among them,/ you are. Less likely to live,/ into the wild go the captive-/ born.” In the erasure itself, these short lines are broken across multiple pages, and the way the words and lines are broken up convey a visceral breathlessness.

With these lines in the opening poem, Sealey delicately holds the culmination of the racist bedrock of American history. At the same time, the way she brings herself into the report — “With the living, I am/ familiar. A woman stretches/ the truth to disappear it, throws/ her voice to animate it” — resists the “Force/ of habit” that takes the official word as final.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.