I Am a Body of Land

Shannon Webb-Campbell

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781771664776
• eBook ISBN: 9781771664783
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2019 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry

Edited, with an introduction by multiple award-winning writer, elder, and activist Lee Maracle.

If poetry is a place to question, I Am a Body of Land by Shannon Webb-Campbell is an attempt to explore a relationship to poetic responsibility and accountability, and frame poetry as a form of re-visioning.
Here Webb-Campbell revisits the text of her earlier work Who Took My Sister? to examine her self, her place and her own poetic strategies. These poems are efforts to decolonize, unlearn, and undo harm.
Reconsidering individual poems and letters, Webb-Campbell's confessional writing circles back, and challenges what it means to ask questions of her own settler-Indigenous identity, belonging, and attempts to cry out for community, and call in with love.

The-o-ry Crit-i-cal

This is post revolution

This is post potential

This is post theory

This is post queernesss

This is post activism

This is post marxism

This is post art

This is post acknowledging the land

This is post unceded

This is post unsurrended

This is post territory

This is post commodification

This is post white guilt

This is post settler

This is post consent

This is post privilege

This is post capital

This is post imagination

This is post segregation

This is post validation

This is post racism

This is post sexism

This is post heterosexism

This is post classism

This is post violence

This is post emotional wounding

This is post jazz

This is post gaslighting

This is post cultural relation

This is post homage

This is post bad faith

This is post self-deception

This is post silencing

This is post routine violence

This is post unpredictable

This is post harm

This is post routine

This is post rape

This is post freedom

This is post reason

This is post emotion

This is post cultural production

This is post essentialism

This is post have been there

This is post haven’t been there

This is post reinterpretation

This is post coming of age

This is post transformative

This is post seeing yourself in the world

This is post archive

This is post belatedness

This is post taboo

This is post questions

This is post process

This is post practice

This is post marginal voices

This is post bacterium

This is post history of writing

This is post humanism

This is post product

This is post cycle

This is post meaning

This is post nourishment

This is post slippage

This is post difference

This is post symbiosis

This is post boredom

This is post process

This is post body

This is post human centre

This is post abstraction

This is post decomposition

This is post drug

This is post irony

This is post hitching post

This is post death

This is post metaphor

This is post truth

This is post communication

This is post thinking animals

This is post science

This is post possibility

This is post ending

This is post thinking about death

This is post importance

This is post big lessons in literature

This is post coding

T...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• i am a body of land
• After the Upheaval
• I Have Been Called Out
• I Want to Embrace My Ancestors
• A Sphere Within Our Sphere
• Somewhere Beyond Known Body and Spirit
• I Looked to the River
• By Reclaiming Ktaqamkuk
• On Airplane Mode
• The Call-Out Was a Cry Out
• I Feed Myself Poems
• Runaway
• See How Low the Moon Hangs
• I Only Have One Photo Left of Mary
• Their World View Is a New Home in an Ancient Land
• I Carry You Through Water
• A Hot Pink Sky
• We Slipped Through the Cracks of a System
• You Fear Retribution
• On Receiving a Government Letter
• Rejecting Our Indian Status
• I Used to Take the Gum from Your Mouth
• Letter to Joseph R. Smallwood
• Elegy Revised
• Outside the Prison
• You Told Me You Were a Hunter
• I Was Only Young
• The Powwow at the Edge of the World
• Another Litany
• If Love Is Our Last Hope the Medicine Wheel Is Our Compass
• The Antelope’s Wife
• A Hyperactive Text
• The-o-ry Crit-i-cal
• Walk in Song
• Red Dress Chant
• This Silent Generation
• Architect of Desire
• I Returned My Bones to the Ocean’s Body
• Water
• Notes to the Poems
• Afterword
• (Land) Ackowledgements
• About the Author
• Colophon