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A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.
Many of the poems in Louise Halfe's Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.
Halfe's poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.
Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples' Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples' Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe.
"Burning in this Midnight Dream honours the witness of a singular experience, Halfe's experience, that many others of kin and clan experienced. Halfe descends into personal and cultural darkness with the care of a master story-teller and gives story voice to mourning. By giving voice to shame, confusion, injustice Halfe begins to reclaim a history. It is the start of a larger dialogue than what is contained in the pages."—from the jury of the Raymond Souster Award
"When the poems appear, the titles are in Cree and English. There are no section breaks, and only black-and-white photos to separate poems that address domestic violence, generational trauma, sexual assault, and the abuse of children. The photos don’t act as reprieve from the pared-down, blunt language of the poems, but rather mark the poems with human faces. Just when we may wish to turn away from the violence of the poems, a child’s smiling face turns toward us, a young man’s silhouette, mothers and their children. There is no escape."—Cassidy McFadzean, Hamilton Review of Books
"In her fourth poetry collection, Burning in This Midnight Dream, Louise Bernice Halfe hath achieved a canonical work of Anglo-Canadian letters, one that will always be as relevant as the Constitution and First Nations and Crown Treaties. In this book, which is less a traditional collection than it is a putative drama, the Cree poet, also known as Sky Dancer, excavates the voices and stories buried in the volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report on the sadistic 'Christianity' and cultural genocide pedagogy of the Residential Schools."—George Elliott Clarke, The Malahat Review
""A maven of language; her own Cree language and English poetics, Louise Halfe writes from a place of honour and integrity and that is constant. She has, in the past played with characters of her legends twisting them into experimental pieces creating new stories from her unique place of cultural authority. In Burning in This Midnight Dream, Halfe shares with us her bravest work to date. She has dug out, from deep inside herself, the cancerous and disturbing tissue from where her dysfunctional realities are born. It is a poetry collection of residential school experiences that inspires understanding, shocks with satisfying truth and opens our own wounds for healing to begin."—Janet Rogers, CBC
, The League of Canadian PoetsLouise Bernice Halfe — Sky Dancer was raised on Saddle Lake Reserve and attended Blue Quills Residential School. Her first book, Bear Bones & Feathers, received the 1996 Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Spirit of Saskatchewan Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. Blue Marrow was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. The Crooked Good won the First Peoples' Publishing Award and the Saskatoon Book Award in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Her fourth book, Burning in This Midnight Dream, won the 2017 Saskatchewan Book Award and the Raymond Souster Award, among numerous other awards. In 2018, as part of the Laurier Poetry Series, her previously published works were compiled in Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe (edited by David Gaertner). Her latest book is awâsis — kinky and dishevelled. Halfe was Saskatchewan's Poet Laureate for 2005-2006, was awarded the Latner Writers Trust Award for her body of work in 2017, and was awarded the 2020 Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. She trained at Nechi Institute as a facilitator, has a Bachelor of Social Work, was granted a lifetime membership in the League of Canadian Poets, and has received three honorary doctorates. In January of 2021, Louise was selected to be Canada's 9th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, serving until December 2022. She currently works with Elders in the organization Opikinawasowin ("raising our children") and lives on the Prairies with her husband, Peter.