Gwen Benaway

Intro -- Copyright -- Epigraph -- Preface: Kwewag Love Themelves Despite All Odds -- Dedication -- Author's Note -- Akii -- Girls Like Me -- White Passing -- Curiosities -- Transition -- Boys -- Endings -- Root -- Burrs -- Boys -- Dysphoria -- Heterosexuality -- Holy Wild -- Boys -- Reverberation -- Pretty -- Phoenix -- Forgiveness -- Olympia, Washington -- Fuck Your Fear -- A Love Letter for Trans Girls -- NDN Transsexual -- Niibii -- Tonight -- Acknowledgements -- About the Author -- Colophon.

Holy Wild

day/break, Governor General's Literary Award Winner Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations. Praise for Holy Wild: "This book is many things, and we are grateful." --Katherena Vermette, author of the award-winning novel The Break "In Holy Wild, Benaway sounds forth a chorus of pronouncements that look something like I am "x," where "x" is at once unavailable to some and ever-proliferating: "this is what makes us holy / even if we are the only ones / who know it." It is in this refusal of singularity that Benaway conjures trans life in a place that is both prior to and in excess of the violence that mires it." --Billy-Ray Belcourt, Griffin Prize winning author of This Wound is a World "Unapologetically, Benaway dares to imagine and celebrate Indigenous transness as radical softness, as sexually active resistance that doesn't entail oppression, but an urgent desire to be here, right now, despite a reality that refuses to acknowledge or even allow its existence in the first place." --Anomaly

Day/Break

In her second collection of poetry, Passage, Gwen Benaway examines what it means to experience violence and speaks to the burden of survival. Traveling to Northern Ontario and across the Great Lakes, Passage is a poetic voyage through divorce, family violence, legacy of colonization, and the affirmation of a new sexuality and gender. Previously published as a man, Passage is the poet's first collection written as a transwoman. Striking and raw in sparse lines, the collection showcases a vital Two Spirited identity that transects borders of race, gender, and experience. In Passage, the poet seeks to reconcile herself to the land, the history of her ancestors, and her separation from her partner and family by invoking the beauty and power of her ancestral waterways. Building on the legacy of other ground-breaking Indigenous poets like Gregory Scofield and Queer poets like Tim Dlugos, Benaway's work is deeply personal and devastating in sharp, clear lines. Passage is a book burning with a beautiful intensity and reveals Benaway as one of the most powerful emerging poets writing in Indigenous poetics today.

Passage

Maiden, Mother, and Crone

Winner of the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards – Transgender Poetry Category Finalist for the 2019 Publishing Triangle Awards – Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Category Longlisted for the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.

Gwen Benaway

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