Undoing Hours

Selina Boan

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780889713970
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Selina Boan's debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan's poems emphasize sound and breath. They tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through nêhiyawêwin.

As a settler and urban nehiyaw who grew up disconnected from her father's family and community, Boan turns to language as one way to challenge the impact of assimilation policies and colonization on her own being and the landscapes she inhabits. Exploring the nexus of language and power, the effects of which are both far-reaching and deeply intimate, these poems consider the ways language impacts the way we view and construct the world around us. Boan also explores what it means to be a white settler–nehiyaw woman actively building community and working to ground herself through language and relationships. Boan writes from a place of linguistic tension, tenderness and care, creating space to ask questions and to imagine intimate decolonial futures.

2.1.a questions and answers

Q: kîkwây ôma what is this

a leak in memory

a love story that doesn’t travel all the way to the end

his forehead against a bus window

his hand between his thighs

he stood cutting onions, tucking his fingers in

when nohtâwiy messaged back

he sat on the wooden bleachers with me

overlooking the public pool and that strange baby-blue stage

where a group of parents danced to a bluetooth speaker

he told me particles in the air make for good sunsets

held my loss between his shoulder blades

a leak in memory

a love story that doesn’t travel all the way to the end

what are endings tho

but another way to know time

to place in the centre of our learning a hand of minutes

A: maskosiy anima that is a blade of grass

a sharp stagger across memory

my first time

at a party hot-boxing a bathroom

socked feet in the centre of the tub

i am a pack of matches

waiting for the friction of light

how do our legs look

dressed in smoke

do we stay young

when we leave

we leave outlines of our bodies on the wall

Q: maskasiy cî awa is this a fingernail

in the mouth of memory

pulled apart like the insides of a clock

undoing hours

a bundle of wâpanêwask unfurls

NDN time stretches grassland over a watch and is never late

i scrub my hands

and the pieces of a story wash up on the bank

i lost my lover and nohtâwiy in the same month

pull missing

hair from my head

in the mirror i watch time drip

into a lake into a love letter into a poem

Possible Answers:

namôya, maskosiy anima no, that is a blade of grass

at a party hot-boxing a bathroom

namôya, maskasiy ana no, that is a fingernail

in the mouth of memory

namôya, maskasiy ana, no, that is a fingernail,

maskosiy anima. that is a blade of grass.

email drafts to nohtâwiy

i call you by your first name.

you and i, like aspen talking to each other underground. messages threading through roots that run beyond us. the summers we visited are an elastic stretched between time, holding keys and junk-drawer magnets together. in this version of events, we aren’t just poems.

i’ll admit, i’ve been afraid to write. so here is my deflection, for everyone to read.

this summer, my roommate nadia got caught in a storm. hair gelled with so much glitter it beamed across her eyebrows like wet stars. one night near the apartment, a boy offered me a piggyback ride, told me my crutche...