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Enlarge Cover
list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Feb 2021
ISBN:9781551528465
publisher:
Arsenal Pulp Press
Description
Indigenous Voices Award finalist
A celebratory, slyly funny, and bluntly honest take on sex and romance in NDN Country.
nedi nezu (Good Medicine) explores the beautiful space that being a sensual Indigenous woman creates - not only as a partner, a fantasy, a heartbreak waiting to happen but also as an auntie, a role model, a voice that connects to others walking the same path. From the online hookup world of DMs, double taps, and secret texts to earth-shakingly erotic encounters under the northern stars to the ever-complicated relationship Indigenous women have with mainstream society, this poetry collection doesn't shy away from depicting the gorgeous diversity in decolonized desire. Instead, Campbell creates the most intimate of spaces, where the tea is hot and a seat is waiting, surrounded by the tantalizing laughter of aunties telling stories.
These wise, jubilant poems chronicle many failed attempts at romance, with the wry humour needed to not take these heartbreaks personally, and the growth that comes from sitting in the silence of living a solo life in a world that insists everyone should be partnered up. With a knowing smile, this book side-eyes the political existence and celebrates the lived experience of an Indigenous woman falling in love and lust with those around her -but, most importantly, with herself.
nedi nezu is a smart, sensual, and scandalous collection dripping in Indigenous culture yet irresistible to anyone in thrall to the magnificent disaster that is dating, sex, and relationships.
About the Author
Tenille K. Campbell is a Dene/Métis author and photographer from English River First Nation in In Treaty Ten, northern Saskatchewan. Her acclaimed poetry collection, #IndianLovesPoems (Signature Editions), was shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award. Campbell is the force behind sweetmoon photography, which specializes in capturing NDN joy in its many forms. She is also the co-creator and a blogger at tea&bannock, an online collective for Indigenous women photographers and artists to share their stories. Campbell completed her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and is working on a doctoral degree in Indigenous Literature at the University of Saskatchewan.
Awards
- Short-listed, Indigenous Voices Award
Editorial Reviews
Campbell's warmth and willingness to show us her heart (and heartbreak) result in poems that are endearing, hilarious and moving. -Geist
Dare we all have such an opportunity to revel in the intimate oratories of Tenille K. Campbell's matriarchy. She asks us to 'know that we are in ceremony' as she undertakes an album of sensual and sexual vignettes rinsed clean of seeds in gentle spring waters. Alternatively, she interrogates fatphobia, Indigenous masculinities, academia, heteropatriarchy, and untangles the ways in which poetry hinges on the pervasive in the stratosphere of social media. Campbell shows us yet again why Indigeneity is wholly and irrevocably erotic by nature. -Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
There are many kinds of intimacy in Tenille Campbell's delicious second collection: that of laughing lovers entangled in damp sheets under the star-strewn northern sky; that of a Dene/Metis woman dreaming her relations with the living land, its histories, and its futures; that of a formidably talented woman in all her complex contexts - poet, scholar, mother, lover - who shifts with ease between evocations of knee-trembling desire, wry humour, tender kindness, and aching loneliness. The poems are a love-language that honours the messy, meaningful complexities of sensual self-determination, the fierce assertion of an Indigenous woman's embodied and visionary power. We are lucky indeed to have the restorative gift of Campbell's work in this ever more alienating world. Read it, share it, be transformed. -Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
Since I was hit on by someone using lines from #IndianLovePoems and immediately went out to buy it, I've been eagerly waiting for Tenille K. Campbell's next collection. What a joy and a blessing to find myself in pages as intimate as staying up late with your best friend sharing truths, as hot as meeting your next lover's gaze, and as sharp as a mean auntie. nedi nezu cements Campbell's reputation as the matriarch of decolonized desire. -Eden Robinson, author of Trickster Drift
Campbell seamlessly portrays the quality of blending tradition with everyday life in today's world throughout the collection ... [Campbell] shows that she has no trouble maintaining her connections to her heritage while also living in the present moment; indeed, she refuses to operate as if they are mutually exclusive. -Arc Poetry
