A new little-free-library-sized literary installation featuring poetry is a personal reconciliation project of Winnipeg writer Bernie Kruchak.

The Rooster Town Poetry Shed is located at 939 Dudley Ave., not far from the final site of Rooster Town, where a number of Métis families lived until they were forced out to make way for Winnipeg’s expansion.

The poetry shed is currently featuring work by poet (and Free Press poetry columnist) melanie brannagan frederiksen, whose collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in fall 2026.

For more on the project see roostertownpoetryshed.ca.

The hand-traced, layered poems in Melanie Dennis Unrau’s latest collection, Goose (Assembly Press, 132 pages, $23), stalk and dance across the page. The poems use Sidney Clarke Ells’ collection of poetry, Northland Trails, as well as his memoirs as source texts, in addition to archival accounts by Indigenous and Métis inhabitants of the North. These poems are an angry, funny, generous intervention into the national mythology.

In the first and third sections, Unrau takes different approaches toward a subversive reading of Northland Trails. Each of the poems in the first section, The Goose, represent a reading of the entire book Unrau traced with specific constraints; the poems in the third section, Contents, are tracings from individual poems.

The poems in the middle section, the tracking line(s), engage directly with archival material. Here Unrau traces the Athabaska River and the unnamed Indigenous and Métis labourers who were harnessed to tracking lines to pull the heavy boats of supplies upstream from the shore, troubling Ells’ frequently repeated account, which casts the trackers as fickle and Ells himself as heroic.

With humour, these poems show the Romantic and heroic aggrandizement with which Ells treated himself to be hollow puffery. “I began to suspect that Ells, who migrated each year between Ottawa and Fort McMurray and who wanted to be seen as a legitimate resident of the north, may have liked to think of himself as a goose.”