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.
Praise for I Am a Body of Land:
Poetry awake with the winds from the Four Directions, poetry that
crosses borders, margins, treaties, yellow tape warning Police Line: Do
Not Cross. Poetry whose traditional territory, through colonization, has
become trauma and shame. Unceded poetry. Read. Respect. Weep. --Susan
Musgrave, author of Origami Dove
Shannon Webb-Campbell's work forces readers out of polite conversation
and into a realm where despair and hard truths are being told, being
heard and finding the emotion strength to learn from it, find out way
out and embrace our beauty as Indigenous women. --Carol Rose Daniels,
author of Hiraeth and Bearskin Diary, winner of the First Nations
Communities READ Award and the Aboriginal Literature Award.
