Life got ahold of me and I forgot to update, but I completed #PortlandBookWeek with a blackout #BookstoreBingo! Bookish was my last stop on the whirlwind 24 bookstore tour and I couldn‘t have picked a better way to end it.
The tagged book + The Ballad of Perilous Graves were my audiobook companions for it and honestly neither one roped me in like I hoped. But the journey was a thrill and reward in itself!
Some days you‘ve gotta eat a McGriddle and read a powerful book that actively defies all those colonial genre boundaries. Joshua Whitehead is an otâcimow (storyteller) to revel in. #gaymay
pickReading Whitehead demands full focus from me, as I work to take full meaning from his poetic language, to gain further understanding of a different culture, a different experience of the world, interspersed with the use of a different language.
This is a collection of non-fiction essays, but it defies the dry confines of that description. 1/?
Before today, if you'd told me there was a poetic, nigh adorable, way to describe an atomic explosion's trademark mushroom cloud, I would have been skeptical to say the least....
pickMy patio is looking groovy with a light snow! I really enjoyed this book by JW, he writes quite lyrically and it was great to listen to him on audio.
pickA blend of essay, confessional memoir and poetry—I found this lyrical nonfiction collection has an academic tone that demanded a certain amount of intellectual effort on my part. I re-listened to much of it, then went back to the parts in the audiobook I‘d bookmarked & listened again. I really liked it, even though didn‘t understand all of it. There are Nehiyaw (Cree) words throughout & Joshua Whitehead narrates his own work. #Canadian #Indigenous
The last six months of 2019 were a whirlwind of depressive bouts sprouting from loss, mourning, sexual assault, abandonment, colonial violence, imperialism, state-sanctioned genocide—all of which for me normalizes an absurd fact of Indigenous life: it hurts to live.
I love my body, by which I mean my selves. I need to tell you that. It goes without saying that loving one‘s own indigeneity is always a political act.
I identify as two-spirit, which means much more than simply my sexual preference within western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme, iskwewyaw, male, nehiyaw, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities.
(Note: I‘ve transcribed this from the audiobook and am uncertain how the Cree words for ‘woman‘ and ‘Cree‘ appear in the printed text.)
I have long argued that the body we inhabit, in its zippered coat of skin, will always be tied to the body of text we create.
The tagged book is one of six that I‘ve finished lately. See: Friday Reads Oct 28: #IndigenousBooks #Queer #Translations #Audiobooks #KidLit #CanLit #Booktube
https://youtu.be/UiqRiDxdV3Q
Making Love with the Land | 
