Blood

by Tyler Pennock

Overview

Longlisted 2023 ReLit Award

Longlisted 2023 First Nations Community READS Award

Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship.

Conceived in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones, Tyler Pennock's Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker's relationship to the living—never forgetting non-human kin.

This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw.

"A music as sensitive as it is revelatory." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771315821
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Tyler Pennock, author of Bones, is a Two-Spirit Queerdo from Faust, Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They were adopted from a Cree and Métis family, and reunited with them in 2006. Tyler is a graduate of Guelph University's Creative Writing MFA program (2013), as well as the University of Toronto (2009). They have lived in Toronto for the past 25 years.

Read an Excerpt

I fear the unseen moments
that brought me here
the loose cords
of an unformed
knot
awaiting the pull

the way the body
gathers lethal elements for years
a slow
determined
saturation

or the hum of weariness
we wear like an old coat

where wet and cold
are preferred over
a little nakedness

and we can't part with
what's killing us

*

I've gotten good
at describing the shape of my oppressor

without knowing how to counter their impact

it's like waking up
in the wrong geography
adaptations circumscribed
by features you don't yet know

being a horse without a herd
in a rocky desert
heat, scarcity and boulders
making fun of its speed and endurance

or a donkey on a farm
confined
dependent on people
to pare their hooves
the way freedom
and desert rock used to

or being forced to a new land
and told
that what you don't survive

others

just

might

*

Editorial Reviews

"Pennock's Blood shines on the parts of the self that defy the ruthlessness of empire. By turns inward to the still and sobering power of language, and again outward to the echoes of 'leaves and wind,' a music as sensitive as it is revelatory ushers us into his unique measure of aliveness. The poet here is engaged and unafraid to look long." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

"The poems in Tyler Pennock's Blood generate a gentle music that is in turns both painful and reverent (sometimes at the same time). I value the way Pennock sits with contradiction and in doing so makes a whole spectrum of feeling possible. An important addition to a blossoming queer Indigenous literary tradition." — Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms

From the Publisher