Blood

Tyler Pennock

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781771315814
• eBook ISBN: 9781771315821
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Longlisted 2023 ReLit Award

Longlisted 2023 First Nations Community READS Award

Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship.

Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock's Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker's relationship to the living—never forgetting non-human kin.

This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.

"A music as sensitive as it is revelatory." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Giwachiyenaanig Gimishoomisinaanag
• Before dawn
• Morning sounds
• I lied
• Imagine me searching
• This is gonna hurt
• After we met, I had the same dream every night for months.
• If you experience enough pain and fear
• I have so many writing books
• Should I survive
• Today a man tried touching me
• What is it about us
• We
• Cities are alive
• Students
• There’s an expression I’d heard
• Earth can bend
• There’s an impatience in us
• You’ve left just a scratch
• Bones are the hardest part of us
• So many men
• Once, the john slipped inside me
• You’re thinking about it
• I enjoyed the john’s unselfishness
• Not that I would want
• I think spring comes for all of us
• You’re a scar now
• The john would have known
• I love how characters
• I’m not always allowed that kind of peace
• It shouldn’t surprise me
• It’s strange how fear travels
• Connecting
• If feelings come in waves
• I count
• You asked about my brain. Wondered how I survive the constant checking.
• It’s been replaced. Now every night I wake to a dark room – different than the ones we get in Covenant House. No light can get in.
• Your fingers slide
• I believe trees
• I don’t care
• Brick walls
• No one should
• After sex
• I used to hit leaves in the yard
• Intimacy now
• I can’t help but think that the couch
• I would tell you more about my dad
• Dried blood
• There’s a richness
• Today the YMCA/YSAP
• I fear the unseen moments
• I want to ask johns
• I find it strange
• And yet here we are
• When you place your entire understanding in writing – a word, a story, a book – that writing is an easy mark to return to, should you lose the nature of who or what those words stood for.
• Maybe it’s not consistency
• I showed these pages to the photographer
• I want our languages back
• Honestly
• Time
• I don’t know if hyperventilating in a room alone means I miss you or if I’m just remembering us through the panic we shared
• You can’t claim to know someone
• You have a yellow fleck in your eye. Have you noticed that?
• One of the first words I learned –
• In English
• So many places
• Animikiig is just another form for thunder – with a missing meaning, until you see the clouds reach down splintering to push at the ground. They remain hidden behind the English version until you see them standing on bolts, riding the earth like it was a flood tide.
• When Cynthia told us
• I think the introduction of an alphabet
• Wolves’ dens
• I think it’s obvious that
• There’s something about men
• Six hundred fucking years
• Living in Canada
• This morning the photographer asked me to stop writing poetry as if you might read it. He said that you were the past that I didn’t need to visit anymore.
• Every night it’s a different face. Every night I try to scream, but the air around me resists – and it feels like exhaling through sand. My voice can’t overtake her moan.
• I know someday
• And I don’t know how to feel –
• My buddy’s
• I’ve gotten good
• I don’t need to adapt
• Every poem here
• I don’t know where these words lead –
• I have so many now.
• Please
• When lava escapes
• To ice
• Ginanaakomigoom Nimishoomisinaanag
• Learning is a lifelong process.
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author