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What is Laurie D. Graham Reading?

By Laurie D. Graham

My job has always made the reading I do a little scrappy, a little piecemeal. Months of pandemic have exacerbated that: my time spent reading is modulating widely—for a while, all I do is read, then I can’t read at all—and I’ve been starting into more books than usual these past weeks. Maybe a disconcerting amount. I tend to have a few books on the go at once, and now I find myself with seventeen. This I do not recommend.

But at the same time, to have that big a group speaking in my head—perhaps a response to these months of isolation, as well as guides in these weeks of protest—lends a polyphony I’m finding nourishing and useful, if not a little unsteadying. (Maybe I’m nourished because it’s unsteadying?)

I’m reading poetry and non-fiction exclusively these days; these are the two genres occupying my writerly mind as well. And I’m doing more re-reading than usual: touchstone writers who’ve influenced the sort of writer I’ve become; books that I count among my favourites; ones that remind me where I am and where I come from.

Add to the list below some of the significant pieces I’ve found lately in magazines and online: Tadzio Richards’s profile, in the May issue of Alberta Views, of Chief Allan Adam, who I’d argue is one of the most significant leaders of our time; a beautiful compendium of Black women’s writing and art on liberation, put together by Nataleah Hunter-Young and Sarah Mason-Case for Canadian Art; this piece by Tim Lilburn about poets with lifelong subjects; Danez Smith’s “Crying, Laughing, Crying at the George Floyd Protests in Minneapolis” in The New Yorker.

So here’s the lot, in no particular order:

Herb Belcourt’s Walking in the Woods: A Métis Memoir

Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams), Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg: This Is our Territory

Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (ed. Yvonne Blomer)

Jericho Brown’s The Tradition

Dennis Lee’s Body Music

Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries

Here: Poems for the Planet (ed. Elizabeth J. Coleman)

Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk

Muse in Prison: Eleven Sketches of Ukrainian Poets Killed by Communists and Twenty-Two Translations of their Poems (ed./trans. Yar Slavutych)

Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst

Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding my Way

Myrna Kostash’s & Duane Burton’s Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River

 

 

Laurie D. Graham is a poet, editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her books are Rove, Settler Education, and The Larger Forgetting, a collaborative chapbook with the Waterloo painter Amanda Rhodenizer. A third full-length book is due out with M&S in 2022. Laurie grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the treaty and traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario).

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Photos courtesy of Laurie D. Graham. Cover image by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

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