Book Description

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-Andr e 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 "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"--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 "make of herself". Praise for Spawn "Like the image of time that passes too quickly, or not quickly enough, between frozen lake and beacon of hope, Gill's poetry wonderfully translates the struggles and perils of adolescence. This is a collection imbued with the poet's great sensitivity, emotionally strong and true." --Elizabeth Lord "Gill writes: 'we bathe in the malaise / of hot asphalt / waiting for a habitable word, ' and we feel the tension of translation, of using language at all, our doomed human technology. It's the hardest thing to capture that frustration in language, much less in translated language, and it's a little miraculous how well it's rendered throughout Gill's haunting lyric flares. Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf "Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving "the chalky veins" of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle. Miller's luminous translation gives us a poet who insists on unwinding layers of language--Indigenous and settler, pop-cultural, philosophical, and spiritual--in search of elemental connection." --Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood "Marie-Andr e Gill undertakes in Spawn a poetry of intimacy and estrangement in technicolor: evoking nostalgia for nature as well as Nintendo, her haunting juxtapositions exist in life cycles of commercial possibilities and ecological impossibilities, of postcolonial globalization and indigenous dislocation. Rendered into crystalline English by poet Kristen Renee Miller, Spawn is an unforgettable work of lyricism and cosmic intelligence." --Katrine ?gaard Jensen, tr. Third-Millenium Heart, winner of the 2018 National Translation Award