Description
Book SynopsisYou're the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart
It's just impossible you won't be back
to quench yourself in my creme-soda
ancestral spirit
Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.
In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in her interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate Gill's interior landscape—of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.
Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Quebecoise woman.
Trade Review“Miller’s translation skillfully delivers the energy and pacing of Gill’s ruminative poems… These pages full of irreverent musings deliver affecting details and candor.” —Publishers Weekly
“Heating the Outdoors is a study in tone, beautifully captured in Kristen Renee Miller’s translations from the French.” —Poetry Foundation
“An exceptional third book by the Saguenay poet, who kneels in the beautiful snowbanks of a love that melts all too quickly.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir
“A luminous, resilient read that finds resonance in our little hidden wounds.” —Rose Carine Henriquez, Le Devoir
