Rachel Bryant – författare

The book So You Could Stand: Stories of Domestic Violence contains three poems. The title poem, So You Could Stand, unravels a horrific tale of domestic violence as seen through the eyes of a wife after she manages to escape her cruel and domineering husband of many years, only to discover that he is now preying upon their devoted and unsuspecting daughter as she attempts to make a normal transition into adulthood. Two additional poems of abuse, The Stalker and The Drunkard, are also included in this revealing and riveting book.

The book Grandmas Hands: A Portrait in Time was inspired by the life of Rachel Bryants paternal grandmother (whose parents were slaves) as well as her own observations of blatant discriminatory and degrading practices inflicted upon those once thought to be inferior.This beautifully written book, consisting of twenty poems mainly reflecting life as it was in Americas Jim Crow South, takes the reader on a powerful journey from slavery to present-day society.Through her unique and eloquent style, Rachel Bryant manages to capture and convey the thoughts and feelings of characters so cleverly portrayed throughout this provocative and awe-inspiring book.While the majority of poems were written for mature audiences, readers will find several poems that are appropriate for all.

Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts - including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry - Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout.This commitment to listening is analogous to homing - the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.