Spawn

Marie-Andrée Gill, Kristen Renee Miller

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781771665971
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665988
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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, 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".

Piekuakami: The Lake

Adult ouananiche have a choice:

return to the lake or winter

in the great troughs of the river

to descend again in spring.

I seize the ice by its haunches

the lake, tangled in its own light

cracks its knuckles in every crevasse

we bathe in the malaise

of hot asphalt

waiting for a habitable word

waiting to win the scratch-off lottery

and take to the woods forever

digging a finger through the rampart’s fresh cement

writing a name, never the same one

before the lake and its gills of raw sky

where the wind whistles a country song forever

it’s time to sober up

from the thirst for certain waters

who knows the colour of a sore throat

cut loose

a lynx drags her claws

down the tender gullet walls

of the ones who drown

before birth

now voilà

we have these yellow-orange floats

and seal fins

to open up our eyes

splitting the surface of the lake

stripping the pelt from its shoulders

where sweetwater salmon drink

the milk of our fallow hearts

we cut our teeth on weapons

I know we are blue plumage

the symmetry of spruce

the language of hailstones

eating cold corned beef at inhuman hours

choking on long macaroni at night

I leave a name behind at the border

at the edge of my disorder

with a trace of the love bite on my neck

drinking rain from clay

all the vodka of the fjord

rubbing balloons in our hair

we will spread a little more ketchup

on the human wound

and birth a spring-

time of seven-up gone flat

ouananiche revive the watercolours

of our blooming organs

time to swallow...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Epigraph
• The Rampart
• The Reserve
• Adolescence
• Piekuakami: The Lake
• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author and Translator
• Colophon