Heating the Outdoors

By Marie-Andrée Gill and Kristen Renee Miller

You're the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart

It's just impossible you won't be back
to quench yourself in my crème-soda
ancestral spirit

Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.

In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in Gill's interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate her interior landscape—of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.

Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Québécoise woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771668156

Book preview

Praise for spawn

This collection of poems is exquisite, exploring delicately and deeply the connection between person and place.

—Rachel Daum, American Literary Translators Association

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.

—Stacy Pratt, Anomaly

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