Emily McGiffin’s poems examine imperial violence and colonialism in South Africa and Canada.
Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself.
my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus
what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand
Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself.
my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus
what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand
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English -
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About the author
Emily McGiffin
Emily McGiffin was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations. She’s the author of Between Dusk and Night, shortlisted for the CAA Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, Subduction Zone, winner of the ASLE Creative Book Award, and Of Land, Bones and Money, a book of literary criticism, and the winner of the 2008 RBC Bronwyn Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for poetry. Currently, she is a Research Fellow at University College London.
