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Conceived in the same world as Pennock’s first two books of poetry, Bones and Blood, Skin is the final book in a trilogy that centres a two-spirit Indigenous person's experiences.
Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. When a Two-Spirit Indigenous person returns home, they begin to understand the world through their relationships to others. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak.
Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what—and who—is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. For readers of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jeanette Armstrong, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those still finding their way home.
"What if home is a cemetery erased by floods, where so many layers of erasure have taken place that it is nearly impossible to speak of oneself or of one's community? Tyler Pennock invents a language in which to do so, one made of rapid, defamiliarized English and a newly re-acquired Cree, a language of blueberries in the freezer, crushed cigarette butts in a coffee cup, kittens appearing unexpectedly beneath a trailer porch. This is a book of looking through skin, of returning on a radically shifted topography, of love and of rage all residing together to reconstruct a livable home beneath which the dead still remember the coming generations."—Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century
"The poetry in Tyler Pennock's Skin unfurls through such delicate observances, 'imagine an opening / an outward push / an expansion down a route / a spread in the trees.' Layered with a gentle melody, Pennock writes each line with an attentive breath, thoughtfully attuned to the quietness of being. Skin is a collection that understands how \every utterance / is a drop pulled / from a puddle / evaporating,' reminding us to pay attention to what is nearly gone, and what has always quietly existed."—David Ly, author of Mythical Man and Dream of Me as Water
Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones (Brick Books), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto.