Blood

Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship.

Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock’s Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker’s relationship to the living–never forgetting non-human kin.

This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.

“A music as sensitive as it is revelatory.”–Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

AUTHOR

Tyler Pennock

Tyler Pennock was adopted from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake area of Alberta. He is a graduate of Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program. He currently lives in Toronto, where he has worked as an educator and community worker for over ten years. Bones is his first book.

Reviews

“Pennock’s Blood shines on the parts of the self that defy the ruthlessness of empire. By turns inward to the still and sobering power of language, and again outward to the echoes of ‘leaves and wind,’ a music as sensitive as it is revelatory ushers us into his unique measure of aliveness. The poet here is engaged and unafraid to look long.”–Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst