Northerny

by Dawn Macdonald

Overview

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772127379
Publisher:	University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	02/22/2024
Series:	Robert Kroetsch Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up in a cabin down a dirt road without electricity or running water. She studied applied mathematics and physics at university, and went to her scholarship interview wearing shoes she had found at the dump. Her summer student projects in space physics involved numerical modeling of the northern lights. Her poetry appears in magazines such as The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Nat. Brut, OxMag, Strange Horizons, and Vallum: A contemporary poetry, among others. Northerny is her first book, and received the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, awarded by the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Table of Contents

• 1.
• Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest
• 11 Conversations
• 5 Ways of Shutting Up
• Littlest
• The 2nd Shortest Day
• The Failure of Winter’s Five-Year Plan
• Quickness
• Increase
• Aperture
• A Strange Request
• Changelings
• The Fungus Speaks
• 2.
• About the Author
• Fire Water Asbestos Mold
• Bird’s Ten
• Binaries (1)
• Binaries (2)
• The Kingfisher
• Walking the Long Loop
• ONLY GENIUS CAN SOLVE THIS PUZZLE
• Transcribed on Leaves and Thrown into the Wind
• A Boring Poem
• 3.
• Lately we’ve been talking
• Our 80s was Iron Maiden
• We are tasked to speak truth
• Please Leave On
• The Forts
• Gun Etiquette
• Charts
• Apologies to a Mouse
• Naturalist’s Notebook. Backyard, July
• In a Scrub Pine
• At Hidden Lakes
• The town filled up
• There’s a lot I can’t talk about
• 4.
• Look at how we didn’t know
• Occupational classification schema
• Every Yukoner owns the 1979
• LongGone Outhouse Blues in 14 Lines
• The One Tree
• Wasp Summer
• This Isn’t the House
• Chit Chat
• There’s only two stories
• Acknowledgements"

Editorial Reviews

"In Northerny, Dawn Macdonald tempers a poetic soulfulness with a comic’s sense for absurdity and punch. These poems speak with smart humor and wit, linguistic delight, and honest observations spiked with confession, always with an ear, too, for what their poet can’t say. Macdonald’s take on born-and-raised life in the north avoids romantic quagmires with a well-cured settler colonial self-consciousness. Macdonald resists worn expectations in this fresh expansion of northern literature rich with voice, earned insight, and meaning." Jeremy Pataky, author of Overwinter

"Dawn Macdonald's poetry is alive with curiosity and truth. She speaks in conversation at times soft and at times bitter, creating images from a reality that can be obscure yet familiar. Macdonald's singular work reveals the unromantic beauty of a storied northern world full of lichen, kingfishers, and dog hair. Her poems open new paths in poetry from the high latitudes. This work is a bright addition to any library." Ernestine Hayes, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017-2018

"Northerny echolocates around the rural, urban, and more-than-human worlds with unflinching curiousity. Macdonald’s poetry bewilders language, making it romp, flit, and twist. Her images are in turn luminous and jarring cut with knife-sharp wit, unafraid to trespass against our expectations." Clea Roberts, author of Auguries

"...the poems here refuse the easy depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop." rob mclennan's blog, May 25, 2024 [full article https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024/05/dawn-macdonald-northerny.html]
# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 5, 2024
# 5 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 12, 2024

"...Macdonald describes a North which is anything but stereotypical, or stereotypically romantic.... Conversational, tangential, at times funny, at times baffling, these poems can also dazzle with their imagery.... There’s all kinds of clever wordplay here..." Kelly Shepherd, Alberta Views Magazine, December 1, 2024

"Dawn Macdonald’s Northerny is a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands 'the personal is heretical,' and glories in that fact. It’s a rush, a relief, and remakes with impishness the notion of what a poem can be." Judges’ Citation: 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize

This doesn't have to go in order;

that's the first thing.

"So begins Dawn Macdonald’s debut poetry collection, Northerny. I found this to be true of the poems themselves—non-linear and reflective. They explore everything from the nature of things to growing up in the Yukon, being in love, being part of a family, and more. I loved that each poem painted pictures in my mind." Armed with a Book, May 26, 2025

From the Publisher