An odometer measures the distance that you have traveled. This odometer measures moments with poems dispersed across life like mile markers. They begin when the poet was a college student of 20 in 1966 and end with the last poem written when he was 78 in 2023. This is 58 years of poetry that runs the gamut of life and transcends the gauntlet of emotions from youth to older adult. There are 403 poems scattered over 20,842 days and they begin on September 5, 1966, with this first line on day...

This is Louis' introspective memoir that spans 50 years. He first focuses on when he met his future wife, Susan, in 1969. She is a successful feminist artist in Chicago that specializes in figurative art. A year later she and Louis drive to Boulder, Colorado after camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. Susan rests while Louis takes a self-guided tour of the Columbine Collegium which is a music school founded by unemployed musicians after the depression. While crossing the campus Louis me...

The acclaimed author of The Orenda gives us a powerful and poignant look into the last moments of Charlie Wenjack, a residential school runaway trying to find his way home.An Ojibwe boy runs away from a North Ontario Indian School. Too late, he realizes just how far away home is. Along the way he's followed by Manitous, spirits of the forest who comment on his plight, cajoling, taunting, and ultimately offering him a type of comfort on his difficult journe...

Marilyn Dumont's Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness, more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship, and white condescension and ignorance. She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian po...

“These are the poems of a master poet. . . . When you read these poems, you will learn to hear deeply the sound a soul makes as it sings about the mystery of dreaming and becoming.” — Joy Harjo, Mvskoke Nation, U.S. Poet LaureatePulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems rooted in Native American oral tradition.One of the mo...

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government's complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into black files" and ...

40 Below is Edmonton's winter anthology. 70 pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction about or inspired by winter in Edmonton. Contributors include Alice Major, Thomas Trofimuk, Jennifer Quist, Michael Hingston, Jessica Kluthe, Diana Davidson, and many many more. This book truly has something for everyone, whether you're warm-blooded or cold-blooded, a snow bird or new Canadian. Enjoy this one of a kind collection and let this frozen city tell you its story. "I've never read ...

"In our time there has been no poet who revived human hearts and spirits more convincingly than William Stafford." —Naomi Shihab NyeSome time when the river is ice ask memistakes I have made. Ask me whetherwhat I have done is my life.—from "Ask Me"In celebration of the poet's centennial, Ask Me collects one hundred of William Stafford's essential poems. As a conscientious objector during World War II, while assigned to Civilian...

"We are matter and long to be received by an Earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children, each of us, without exception, every one. The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us." —from The River You Touch When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with Body of Water, the book was acclaimed as "a classic" (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee. Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated All...

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

 If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?           Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

From the grandeur of the Great Plains to the solitude of the northern woods, from the intensity of a summer storm to the quiet redemption of a fresh blanket of snow, Kent Nerburn's Native Echoes pays homage to the power of the land to shape our hearts and spirits.An Ojibwe elder once counseled Nerburn to "always teach by stories, because stories lodge deep in the heart.'' Using skills learned from Native storytellers as well as a deep reverence for the wor...