Emily McGiffin’s poems examine imperial violence and colonialism in South Africa and Canada.

Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself. 
 
my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus
 
what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand
 
 

 

"Disturbs and delights."—Literary Review of Canada

"Ground-shattering poems...McGiffin’s twofold vision in axe and bayoneted rifle slices the settling and unsettling entries and cadences to past and future continents, as she blades the thickets of land and language."—The Miramichi Reader

“This is a haunting and ambitious book. Emily McGiffin’s precise, stopping-you-in-your-tracks language will hold the reader spellbound as she tracks capital’s lust for command through Africa and the cleared lands of North America.” —Tim Lilburn

“Highly original—a remarkable marriage of political and lyric intelligence.” —Jan Zwicky

Emily McGiffin was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory (in Tofino, British Columbia) and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations (in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley). She is currently a Research Fellow at University College London. McGiffin is the author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics.