Governor General's Award-winning Metis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette's second collection, river woman, explores her relationship to nature - its destructive power and beauty, its timelessness, and its place in human history.

Award-winning Metis poet and novelist Katherena Vermette's second book of poetry, river woman, examines and celebrates love as decolonial action. Here love is defined as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma, and trauma is understood to exist within all times. The poems are grounded in what feels like an eternal present, documenting moments of clarity that lift the speaker (and reader) out of the illusion of linear experience. This is what we mean when we describe a work of art as being timeless.

Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it's through language and the body particularly through language as it lives inside the body that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the city, the land, and the water, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.

Vermette honours the river as a woman her destructive power and beauty, her endurance, and her stories. These poems sing from a place where "words / transcend ceremony / into everyday" and "nothing / is inanimate."

REVIEW COPIES:

• Publishers Weekly
• Booklist
• Kirkus Reviews

About the Author
KATHERENA VERMETTE is a Metis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Metis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her NFB short documentary, this river, won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Peoples Festival and a Canadian Screen Award. Her first novel, The Break, is the winner of three Manitoba Book Awards and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and it was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Canada Reads.

Reviews
These spare, imagistic poems live up to the words of the Vietnamese spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted in an epigraph: 'If our hearts are big, we can be like the river. * Toronto Star *
A book that is at once deeply personal and politically charged. * Quill and Quire *
Vermette's new collection is a strong follow-up to her Governor General's Award-winning debut, 2012's North End Love Songs. * Winnipeg Free Press *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487003463
Author Katherena Vermette
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Publisher House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Weight(grams) 140g
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 139mm * 10mm