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How to Nourish a Cannibal

By (author): Jess Housty

From award-winning, bestselling poet Jess Housty, a collection that offers nourishment through land-based medicine and ancestral wisdom.

Following their critically acclaimed debut Crushed Wild Mint, Jess Housty offers a new collection capturing connections between kinship, ancestral knowledge and spirituality. Drawing on Heiltsuk supernatural beings like Báxvbakvalan̓usiwa (the Great Cannibal at the North End of the World), these poems encircle the idea of the cannibal, a complex figure who is at times dangerous but also a generous conduit for spiritual gifts. They tap into the poet’s own wildness, love and tenderness—and explore the sweet, agonizing anticipation of shared feasts, both from the land and of the body.

AUTHOR

Jess Housty

Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

Reviews

“Human desperately needs a new relationship with Nature that sustains us. Jess Housty guides us through different eyes.”

“If humans are to survive we must relearn to love, respect and protect nature, whose laws birth and cradle us in perfect abundance, not the scarcity our culture pretends. Jess Housty’s poems gently, joyfully and wisely explore and uphold a rich alternative. It will save us.”

“With breathtaking luminosity, Jess Housty brilliantly weaves potent and visceral imagery with supernatural wisdom and earth-shattering poetic skill. How to Nourish a Cannibal will change how you see, feel and breathe in the world.”

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Details

Dimensions:

108 Pages
7.5in * 5.25in

Published:

September 15, 2026

City of Publication:

Gibsons, BC

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Nightwood Editions

ISBN:

9780889715189

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Indigenous

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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