Laurie D. Graham
Biography
Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. She has published three books of poetry: Fast Commute, a book-length poem published by McClelland & Stewart in 2022, Settler Education, which was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry, and Rove, which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Laurie’s maternal family comes from around Derwent, Alberta, by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from around Semans, Saskatchewan, by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.
Poetics Statement
“Aspects of my poetic work include deepening knowledge of self and home, decolonization, prairie history, environmental collapse, and the long poem.
My first book, Rove, came out with Hagios Press in 2013. Rove is my book-length answer to the question “Where do you come from?” It is a long poem that tries to make visible how non-Indigenous understandings of settlement reveal large gaps and silences in one’s knowledge of place.
My second book, Settler Education, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2016 and is about ongoing flawed non-Indigenous understandings of history and responsibility. Taking the Frog Lake “Massacre” and the Northwest Resistance as its throughlines, it attempts to examine and rectify those flaws, showing both how they reverberate in the present moment and how they connect the Prairies with southern Ontario.
My third book, a long poem called Fast Commute, was published by M&S in 2022, and it turns toward ecological destruction and white supremacy, aiming to deepen understandings of and respect for place both within and outside the dissociative registers of colonialism and capitalism, to see and begin to understand the forms and manners of non-human life being degraded and destroyed, and to train for dealing with loss on a grand scale. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
from Rove
Say cloverleaf, polyethylene.
Say this parking lot slinks into marshland. Say it bristles into scrubland.
Say this mall becomes a bonfire;
you travel its plastic smoke.
Say sky, fescue, say Wîsahkêcâhk, say La Vérendrye and Henday.
Say heart-choke, say groundbreak, say garrison
with gunbarrel eyes. Say there’s a fist yelling This is my apartment now
in a language you don’t know.
Say geno-matri-patricide, regicide and terracide and skyocide,
say sapling, say childblood, cry doctor,
say your piece then get out, say translate, please, translate.
Say coyote, say smallpox, say creekbottom—look: Wîsahkêcâhk.
Say Big Bear. Say Frog Lake, fresh loam, buffalo
hide, free land, thistle, aspen, sweat.
Riel, say Riel can govern in Michif.
Say colour, say colourless eye, say Queen’s portrait,
say here, here is mine, I bought it,
say settler, claim poverty, profess better and see the felled trees,
say brethren, bread and wagons; say Spanish flu,
say railyard, sing the combustion engine,
say the singing of your name in the new air,
say virgin territory and believe it.
Say the Lord’s bounty, say the wheatfields, say the dust, pick the rocks,
say canola and soybean, thresh, thrush,
say the laundry on the line, say the dank root cellar,
say the numbers, tell the Wheat Board where to go,
say it fast like an auction and move to the city,
say minimum wage and grunt while you work,
say benefits and rigpig derrick oilsand tailings pond boom—
say busted skull, say tuition fund and heritage fund,
say concrete scaffold, say it far from home, say the length of your commute
at the sound of the tone, say Ralph Klein and spit in the dirt.
Say Sky Dancer, say Zwicky. Say Alberta and Saskatchewan
and switch the order. Say Wayne Gretzky Drive,
say it’s five-on-three and he’s on a breakaway,
scream it in the riot on Canada Day, whisper it into your lager,
say it from the hollow of the couch, say it while you piss in the alley,
hiss it into your lover’s ear, say it to your broker and his secretaries,
tell it to the lawyer, to the landlord when the heat’s turned off and the pipes freeze,
say it again to the food bank and again to the caseworker:
say cloverleaf highway polyethylene grocery sack.
Say fluorescent lightbulbs will save
the earth, say there’s a heart
in the middle of it (Please tell me you can hear it),
say glut and Democracy, say it in absentia,
say your little heartbeat, send it through the layers,
say it in the muck in this marsh, in this bristling parking lot.
from Fast Commute
Paint smudge. Shoeprints through a spill of yellow locust leaves.
Overhead, the jagged edges of a different leaf, larger, still green.
Forgetful of shape, pattern, name—English name or Latin name—
all I do is look at them, passive as television,
only reach out my hand when they’re ailing or brightly hued.
Cars on the overpass, a drum with no beat, just frequency,
spraying detritus over the barricades, each stroke presumed
individual. The freeway held above the neighbourhood
like a trophy. Small yellow leaves swarming in side-road gusts.
Vegetable gardens beside a church, fences around the died-back.
Landscape fabric and stained mulch. The grass saturated,
the grass torn away along the artery, dandelion, clover, marigold
reflowering in approaching frost. The slough we pass on the way
to the liquor store. A juniper grey with berries,
flashing with waxwings. A rush of wind through squat maple
as the temperature drops swiftly.
All the while, engines along the raised vein.
Walking the sidewalks of an old suburb I do not know,
googling how to make pysanka dye out of all these black walnuts,
sidewalks on one side of the street, a childhood jack-o’-lantern
neighbourhood, the clouds frightening and rapid, low and sudden,
tall branches whipping, cars profuse along the thoroughfare,
a drone that forms in the south maybe, the on-ramps—
how the ear must have it start somewhere—
behind structures of cinder-block, behind exploding scarlet
Virginia creeper, exploding terrier on a rope in a yard, no beginning or ceasing,
the wildness right up to the wall with its shitty graffiti and holes cut
for firehoses at points blanked out by the flashing sides of trucks.
The angles of the roofs, the rain barrels, flower beds, fertilizer spreaders.
These versions of where I come from.
Knowledge of home in danger of becoming academic.
An empty can of energy drink under a sugar maple.
A black squirrel crossing critical thresholds:
roadwall, greenstrip, chainlink, trail, wooden fence, property.
Ubiquity of Tims cups. Buckthorn. Creeper. Confetti
of locust leaves reanimated by SUVs through the subdivision.
The bright yellow mush trails to nothing as the rain picks up again,
falls sideways.
Number One Canadian
from Settler Education
Stutter-stepping. The last fumes out
of Ontario. Beds and sliding doors and dining cars tunnelling
through the forest, its genealogy
of clear-cut, its firework trees new and hot.
We show them our ghost stations. We show them
tea at the window as birch die tangled
in power lines, birch hauling lines
down to the level of marsh, and marsh rising
to meet electricity.
This is the line.
A propane tank every fifty clicks,
wall-eyed shoots and utility corridors,
gift-buying hours in the recreation car and hints
of lake and woodsmoke if you’re looking for them.
No Oh My Nation, no God Save Our Queen,
no colonial imperative except in our being here, in what it means
to shower on a moving train, track rolling under the drainhole,
the luxurious pillows, my last-minute discount.
This is what they starved a people for.
Through tree scenes, tableaux in the dome car,
the soldiers, the settlers, the track laid, the way made.
Making goods of them. Servants, subjects, comrades, always
more, and the trees smoulder, the trace smoke in the camera’s vision
that comes of passing too fleetly. We pause at vistas and wildlife,
coniferous worming at the periphery.
A train car neat with men and their rifles.
Outside, threads of campsmoke obscured by clouds, by trees.
And ships full, full with people, flat and heavy, an ocean of skin.
Skin seeping. Weeping wounds and stomach virus. All the meat
rancid in barrels. All the bacon rancid in the fort
and the Cree starving through winter, camped
within sight of the stockpiles.
And how hard it is for me to write
what came before.
And the tree-planters paying down their student loans, their blisters
an economy of impatience—
the travellers restless rounding the big lakes, they buy the wild blueberries,
they take photos of each other beside dead buildings along the line,
they fixate in the dome car as the last light leaves the sky, they wonder why
we’re stopped here, why we’re waiting,
again, every goddamn freight train,
waiting, middle of nowhere.