Spawn
Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?
The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"--her voice and her identity.
Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself".
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The journey of Gill's lyric speaker is at once relatable in its particulars and distinctively evocative. Miller's skillful translation makes vivid a landscape and language that will transport readers. --Publishers Weekly
The most impressive part of this book is how such few words carry such grand emotions, how the poetry seems to build an entire landscape then touch on every part of its poetic world. The 'spawn' seems to be both the poetic voice and the poem itself. Through the lyrical transformations, through the linguistic translation, at the end of the book it was I the reader who felt changed. --The Kenyon Review
Gill is intimately familiar with violence, but from the side of the victim rather than the perpetrator. She writes about the claustrophobia of life on a reserve ('get me out of these fifteen square kilometres') and the conditions that have been foisted upon her by a historically rapacious colonial system of governance: 'I am a village that didn't have a choice.' --Quill and Quire
This collection of poems is exquisite, exploring delicately and deeply the connection between person and place. --American Literary Translators Association
The book takes the life cycle of the ouananiche salmon in Lake Piekuakami as an overarching metaphor, reflecting on confines -- those we choose, those chosen for us, and those we don't realize we have a choice about. Gill contemplates, in small poems surrounded by lots of white space, the struggle of "spawning" and all it represents (instinct, fulfillment, continuance, more), for a young person just stepping over the threshold into independence. --Anomaly
Spare and image-driven, the poems in 'Spawn' chart a young woman's coming of age with a captivating mix of lyricism and earthy candour. --Toronto Star
Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness. Here, poems summon a spawn of wonderworking dreams: 'a woman risen up from all these winter worlds, heaped with ice [and] ready to start again'. --Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order. --Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving 'the chalky veins' of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle. --Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood
