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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD
Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness.
Bones, Tyler Pennock's wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach.
At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero's journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers.
"Pennock's shifting, expansive book-length poem luminously reflects the scattered fragments of memory with language that fluiding mixes abstraction, reflection and recurrent imagery. Bones gradually unveils the pain and trauma that seeps through time and relations, in a way that mimics the heart's unveiling itself. His touchstones of Indigenous ceremony and ritual grounds the collection in a way that navigates the reader through a rich archeology of bones that are not merely relics, but oracles."—from the jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
"Here is a spare and urgent voice that speaks of 'wounds and beauty,' that gestures to a story of trauma and abuse while offering us a potent journey of self-reckoning and reclamation. Bones entwines brutality with the deepest tenderness and in its clear-eyed way asks us, as poetry must, to re-see the world."—Catherine Bush
"Tyler Pennock's poetry unfurls like breath: measured, light, caught, whispering, and vital. It charts memory with a steady hand and unerring allegiance to locating the 'beauty/in terrible things.' Bones addresses the effects of intergenerational, state-sponsored trauma with an enviable grace, inscribing and affirming life on the other side of overwhelming pain, abuse, and grief. It carries on, resilient, defiant, gazing at the stars, one breath at a time."—Laurie D. Graham
"Political language emerges as another of the discourses that are themselves rendered as sinews of the living, breathing, verbalizing individual."—Carl Watts, Canadian Literature
, The League of Canadian PoetsTyler Pennock is a Two-Spirit Queerdo from Faust, Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They were adopted from a Cree and Métis family, and reunited with them in 2006. Tyler is a graduate of Guelph University's Creative Writing MFA program (2013), as well as the University of Toronto (2009). They have lived in Toronto for the past 25 years. Bones is their first book.