SUMMARY

Poetry. Translated by Kristen Renee Miller. SPAWN is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andrée Gill's poems ask how one can reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers. The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and nineties-kid culture, SPAWN is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "takes the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her true north--her voice and her identity. Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to make of herself.

"In any translation there are three texts: the original, the translation, and the text that exists in the gulf between them. What makes Kristen Renee Miller's translations of Marie-Andrée Gill so remarkable is the way that third ghost-text seems at times to step into our field of vision. Gill writes: 'we bathe in the malaise / of hot asphalt / waiting for a habitable word,' and we feel the tension of translation, of using language at all, our doomed human technology. It's the hardest thing to capture that frustration in language, much less in translated language, and it's a little miraculous how it's rendered throughout Gill's haunting lyric flares. 'I'm just trying to resemble / this ancient water of which I am the child,' she writes, and then there it is in the room with us--the weight of the centuries, the weight of the trying. SPAWN is unforgettable poetry of the highest order."--Kaveh Akbar