RIVER WOMAN

Governor General's Award - winning Métis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette's second work of poetry, river woman, examines and celebrates love as postcolonial action. Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it's through language and the body - particularly through language as it lives inside the body - that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker revels in the physical pleasures of learning Anishnaabemowin ("the language / I should have already known"), as she contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the natural world and urban structures, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.