“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

“Gill is intimately familiar with violence, but from the side of the victim rather than the perpetrator. She writes about the claustrophobia of life on a reserve (‘get me out of these fifteen square kilometres’) and the conditions that have been foisted upon her by a historically rapacious colonial system of governance: ‘I am a village that didn’t have a choice.'” —Quill and Quire

“Spare and image-driven, the poems in ‘Spawn’ chart a young woman’s coming of age with a captivating mix of lyricism and earthy candour.” —Toronto Star

“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

“The book takes the life cycle of the ouananiche salmon in Lake Piekuakami as an overarching metaphor, reflecting on confines — those we choose, those chosen for us, and those we don’t realize we have a choice about. Gill contemplates, in small poems surrounded by lots of white space, the struggle of “spawning” and all it represents (instinct, fulfillment, continuance, more), for a young person just stepping over the threshold into independence.” —Anomaly

“Marie-Andrée Gill’s spare, luminous micropoems are endlessly surprising, twisting out, into, and unto themselves like complicated lovers. Defiantly fragmentary, these are less petits poèmes en prose than stunning shards of tongues, embodied vernaculars slowly, steadily unsettling grammars. Kristen Renee Miller’s translations retain the elegance and shimmer of the originals while wondrously conveying their knottedness, their syntax of skin. When at last we reach Nitassinan, we are reminded of the world’s poetry documents, but also of the worlds it creates. This is poetry that claims the power to ‘gnaw the meat off / each day and spit out the pin bones’ through a language as unresolved as our decolonial dreams and as necessary as our sovereign desires.” –Urayoán Noel, Judge for the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

“Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“The most impressive part of this book is how such few words carry such grand emotions, how the poetry seems to build an entire landscape then touch on every part of its poetic world. The ‘spawn’ seems to be both the poetic voice and the poem itself. Through the lyrical transformations, through the linguistic translation, at the end of the book it was I the reader who felt changed.” —The Kenyon Review

“This collection of poems is exquisite, exploring delicately and deeply the connection between person and place.” —American Literary Translators Association

“The journey of Gill’s lyric speaker is at once relatable in its particulars and distinctively evocative. Miller’s skillful translation makes vivid a landscape and language that will transport readers.” —Publishers Weekly