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".
Praise for Spawn:
"Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their
steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid
waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness. Here,
poems summon a spawn of wonderworking dreams: 'a woman risen up from all
these winter worlds, heaped with ice [and] ready to start again'."
--Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
"Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order." --Kaveh Akbar,
author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
"Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots,
preserving 'the chalky veins' of ancestral memory pulsing just below our
modern hustle." --Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood
