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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INDIGENOUS VOICES AWARD
The poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community—a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from.
These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice—how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything—an entire cross-section of lived experience—written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words' embrace. Dion-Glowa's poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.
"Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight."—Sachiko Murakami, author of Render
"A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed."—John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam
"These poems ring out from a dusty landscape snagged by thistle and thorn, wandering in and out of food banks, prisons, queer daydreams and the harsh realities of hard living, in one nice dress. Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight, swims through dream-like metaphors, is always charged with the healing power of testimony. A moving and unforgettable first collection."—Sachiko Murakami, author of Render
"As I read this work, I was taken back, time and again, to those days when I was a young street poet who had so much to say at a time where it felt like no one was listening. There are many times when sentiment needs to be expressed in the most bold and unapologetic way it can, and the brashness and frank delivery found in this work is the hallmark of a collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed. These are not exploitative poems, nor are they the Victim Impact Statement of a wounded spirit. This collection is the chronicle of an eyewitness to reality, without compromise."—John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam
"Another of Dion-Glowa's best assets is their talent for clear-eyed observations on the nature of poverty and its afterlives."—Tara McGowan-Ross, Vallum
"It seems that for Dion-Glowa, there is healing in honesty, in the act of proclamation. To finally call the truth out, to finger-point, to say out loud how it feels is to process grief. Here anger, sadness, guilt, and resentment, are not emotions to bottle up but emotions to express as a way to heal. This fearlessness shines through the collection, inviting readers to revisit their own lives in a sort of cleansing ritual."—Kendra Heinz, Room
"In these challenging, questioning, deeply personal, and darkly political poems, Justene Dion-Glowa asks difficult questions, and the stories she tells as partial answers offer little space for distance, which is as it should be in such poetry of witness."—Sharon L. Barnes, University of Wyoming's Journal of Working-Class Studies
,Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis creative, beadworker and poet born in Win-Nipi (Winnipeg) and has been residing in Secwepemcú'lecw since 2014. They are a Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity alumni. They have been working in the human services field for nearly a decade. Their microchap, TEETH, is available from Ghost City Press. Trailer Park Shakes is their first full length poetry book.