Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Finalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award
Finalist, 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in English

I am made of centuries & carbohydrates
the development of my molars
the hunger the teeth grew
has been with me since childhood
I can't escape the mouths of others

Brandi Bird's long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird's work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the "I" of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don't speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird's poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages-specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Metis-and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.

About the Author
BRANDI BIRD is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Metis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples. Bird's poems have been published in Catapult, The Puritan, Room Magazine, and others. They are a fourth year BFA student at the University of British Columbia, but their heart is always yearning for the prairies.

Reviews

This is Bird's gospel ... They transform prayer into poetry.

* British Columbia Review *

An expansive, experimental consideration of how intergenerational trauma, knowledge, and violence grow like limbs ... Drawing on their experience as a queer and Indigenous author, [Brandi Bird reveals], sharply and beautifully, the whiplash of coming of age in a time of contradiction-when reparations and profound systematic failures arrive on the same day.

* Literary Review of Canada *

Bird's clear, forceful voice stacks imagistic snippets in formally inventive poems and leaves the reader to intuit and feel through how they all fit together in an act of engaged, attentive witnessing.

* The Tyee *

Honest and transformative, these poems portray and reach beyond Prairie landscapes and wounded lives.

* Prairie Books NOW *

The All + Flesh is a sophisticated debut work ... Over and over again, time is suspended in the poems, and in this state of timelessness, we are able to transcend the limitations of western linearity and thought and to reconnect with relationships that have been stunted or lost. This is an invigorating, liberating read.

* Miramichi Reader *


Awards
Short-listed for Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in English 2024 (Canada) and League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award 2024 (Canada) and League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award 2024 (Canada). Long-listed for League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award 2024 (Canada).



Book Information
ISBN 9781487011826
Author Brandi Bird
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Publisher House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Weight(grams) 167g