I Am a Body of Land

Introduction by: Lee Maracle

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.

AUTHOR

Shannon Webb-Campbell

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a Mi’kmaq poet, wrtier, and critic. Her first book, Still No Word (2015) was the inaugural recipient of Egale Canada’s Out In Print Award. She was Canadian Women In the Literary Arts critic-in-resentices in 2014, and she currently sit’s on CWILA’s board of directors. Who Took My Sister? is her second book.

AUTHOR

Lee Maracle

Lee Maracle is an author and critic born in Vancouver. A prolific First Nations writer and expert on First Nations culture and history, Lee Maracle is an influential Aboriginal voice in Canadian postcolonial criticism.