Brandi Bird – författare

Winner, 2024 Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry in EnglishFinalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for PoetryFinalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial AwardFinalist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster AwardLonglist, 2024 League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial AwardCBC Best Poetry of 2024I am made of centuries & carbohydratesthe development of my molarsthe hunger the teeth grewhas been with me since childhoodI can’t escape the mouths of othersBrandi Bird’s long-anticipated debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, explores the concepts of health, language, place, and memory that connect its author to their chosen kin, blood relatives, and ancestral lands. By examining kinship in broader contexts, these frank, transcendent poems expose binaries that exist inside those relationships, then inspect and tease them apart in the hope of moving toward decolonial future(s). Bird’s work is highly concerned with how outer and inner landscapes move and change within the confines of the English language, particularly the “I” of the self, a tradition of movement that has been lost for many who don’t speak their Indigenous languages or live on their homelands. By exploring the landscapes the poet does inhabit, both internally and externally, Bird’s poems seek to delve into and reflect their cultural lineages—specifically Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis—and how these transformative identities shape the person they are today.

“This poem begins where Bulimia endsor maybe, just maybe, when it started. Wherethe differential diagnosis is confusedby decades of self-made violence. Poverty,colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatterone day, if not now…”Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as "sovereignty" itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.