A Family of Dreamers

by Samantha Nock

Overview

Short-listed for Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize 2024

In this debut poetry collection, Samantha Nock redefines where and what “home” is. A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves together threads of fat liberation, desirability politics, and heartbreak while working through her existence as a young Indigenous woman coming of age in the city. The result is a love song to northern cuzzins, dive bars, and growing up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772015478
Publisher:	Talonbooks, Limited
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Samantha Nock is a Cree-Métis writer and poet originally from Treaty 8 Territory in the Peace Region of northeast British Columbia. Her family is originally from sâkitawâhk ᓵᑭᑕᐚᕽ (Île-à-la-Crosse), Saskatchewan. Samantha currently resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands in so-called Vancouver. She has had works published in Maisonneuve, Vice, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others. You can find her on Twitter @sammymarie and Instagram @2broke4bingo.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A Family of Dreamers is a tender, beautiful, and brilliant debut poetry collection. With each de ly wri en line, Samantha Nock leads readers into di erent places, emotions, and timelines, and even though you are there every step of the way, you will still be surprised at where you end up. ese stories live in tea, bannock, the seasons, and spines, and I can’t wait to return to them, again and again, whenever I need to be awed by pure prairie love.

Set amongst johnny-jump-ups, chickweed, season-singing chickadees, chokecherries, cutbanks, and west-coast cityscape, A Family of Dreamers sings a song of survivance to kin and Land. With generous intimacy and refusal of settler recognition/reconciliation, Nock allows readers to dreamremember alongside the poet in and on her homelands of body, peace region, and prairie.

Like the river about which Samantha Nock so movingly writes, A Family of Dreamers is “both a mighty and tender thing.” Each poem is an elegy and an ode – to family, to the Ancestors, to the Land, to northern BC, to one’s own body. Nock reminds us that to write a poem is to write oneself towards a possible life. By the book’s end, I felt that I had witnessed something rare and beautiful.

Editorial Reviews

"Nock’s conversational cadence invites the reader to witness a practice of tender and truthful regard between the speaker and her ancestors, her community and herself." —Winnipeg Free Press

From the Publisher