Liz Howard

Liz Howard is a poet, editor, and teacher. Her work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the liberatory potentials of language as art. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at the University of Toronto, the rare Charitable Research Reserve, University of Winnipeg, McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and for The Capilano Review. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. 

Poetics Statement

“Both of my books emerged from a process of Two-eyed seeing, where both Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and Western scientific perspectives are engaged with and represented. In my first book I pulled concepts and language from a variety of scientific fields (archaeology, astronomy, environmental science, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology) and explored the Shaking Tent, an Anishinaabe rite for obtaining beyond-human knowledge, as a model for ancestral inquiry and connection. My second book braided Anishinaabe sky knowledge with Western cosmology to examine the ongoing impacts of contact and the possibility of another world.

Returning and the tension between its inevitability (as in repetition compulsion) and impossibility (you can never step into the same river twice) is always present in my work. I’m interested generally in recursion, of inputs feeding back into themselves, and this emerges as self-reference and “re-mixing.” I find myself revolving around the intersections of different “problem spaces” such as ecology, voice and form, liberation, personal and familial history, and abjection.

—from Canthius interview, “On Writing and Returning: Interview with Liz Howard”

Sample Poems

Spring Letter

Waabooz,
tracking through the last of snow
love is a root I stumble over
in search of you.

Geese fly backwards in my mind,
a rewind that a stand of tamaracks
sees just perfectly:

there is no way to trap
the anxious rabbit of me
as my hide also reorders itself
inside the brush of wide time.

From Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

Contact

We rested back unto the lakes and marshes
into the light dialysis of heron and arrowy
swallow with all the trees of silver tongue
gently from the melting lakes and streamlets

into the sweet radiation of the earliest flower
in the Northland intolerable toward
the red stone the stem a reed

into the puffed metazoic coal became the water

into the affirmative action embryonic mortality
of the loon summit robin gazed

into the bigger than the big-sea-water

bioaccumulation became us Athabasca
sweet reconciliation spoke
in mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium
along the phyiognomy of the amphibian
via which we descended

the women of bitumen looked over tailing ponds
like a cloud-rack of a tempest
rushed the pale canoes of wings and thunder
to kill the wilderness in the child
sweeping westward our remnants
sulpha infinite, sorrow extracted tuberculosis

under the jurisdiction of ravens
in the covert of pine trees

or an education by thieves in the evening

from Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

Boreal Swing

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

the abdominal cavity emptied

haul him up between two pines

the body inverted

antlers almost grazing

the soil

each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

to allow the flesh to cool

then she'd climb inside

the open chest

fix her toes along the ledge

of two ribs

and with a kick to the bull's left shoulder

he sent her

swinging

from Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent