Lunar Tides

Expansive and enveloping, Webb-Campbell’s collection asks, “Who am I in relation to the moon?” These poems explore the primordial connections between love, grief, and water, structured within the lunar calendar.

The poetics follow rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Originating from Webb-Campbell’s deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves. Written from a mixed Mi’kmaq/settler perspective, this work also explores the legacies of colonialism, kinship, and Indigenous resurgence.

Lunar Tides is the ocean floor and a moonlit night: full of possibility and fundamental connections.

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.

Reviews

“Webb-Campbell explores the idea of ‘mother’ as meta-origin birthplace/home and also the literal mother of the poems’ speaker, who is grieving her own mother’s death.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books

“The structure of the collection, following as it does the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebbing and flowing of the tide, both reinforces the ongoing harm of colonial and capitalist ways of thinking, ways that insist on a tidy and timely resolution of grief and, later in the collection, assembles an alternative vision: ‘Learn that loss has its own time, and you are a small animal reeling.'” —Winnipeg Free Press

“The poems in Lunar Tides seek to define grief, and ultimately find a path toward healing. We, all of us, have two mothers: Our human mothers, as well as our Mother Earth. To understand that connection is to understand ourselves.” —Roses and Reviews