Making love with the land Essays

Novelist Whitehead (Jonny Appleseed) examines the relationship between queerness, the body, and language in his intimate first foray into nonfiction. In "I Own a Body That Wants to Break," Whitehead reflects on his experience with disordered eating, finding that the root for the word body in Middle English means "trunk": "Again this blanket of flesh is rooted in the land," he writes. "Writing as a Rupture" considers genres and what autobiography means ("In what ways is an autobiography also an obituary?"), while "The Year in Video Gaming" examines how Fortnite served as "a medium for escapism, entertainment, and social enrichment" when his cousins turned to it after a death in the family. "My Aunties Are Wolverines" is a reflection on mourning, and "Who Names the Rez Dog Rez" asks "What does loneliness mean to a rez dog whose foot is wounded from a trapper's coils?" Whitehead weaves Indigenous Cree language throughout the essays to powerful effect, and though his metaphors can at times be winding, he asks moving questions without resorting to simple answers--"Can a body be sovereign if you continually self-destruct it?" he asks, and "What does it mean to let go of the self?" Fans of the personal essay will relish Whitehead's evocative, rich prose. Agent: Stephanie Sinclair, CookeMcDermid. (Nov.)

A collection of essays by a poet, novelist, and professor of international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary. "Am I queer enough to be queer? Perhaps the answer is no. But also, perhaps the answer is yes." So asks Whitehead, Oji-Cree/nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation. The author resists classification precisely because, borrowing a page from Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. "I identify as Two-Spirit," he writes, "which means much more than simply my sexual preference within Western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme/iskwewayi, male/ nâpew, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities." In other words, even as he rejects old, often outdated terms, Whitehead demands to be deemed whatever he deems himself to be--a recipe for loneliness as a teenager, he allows, one that, with weight issues mixed into the brew, yielded cause for alienation and angst. The opening essay highlights an extended metaphor about likening himself to the rough-and-tumble "rez dogs" that own the territory between wild and settled. A brave rez dog was able to chase down a bear, an event that Whitehead likens to a kind of possession, the spirit of the bear churning inside himself as he eats it, "his amino acids and my body-milk coming together and syllabic elements." While some of the pieces are celebratory, honoring the homeland implied in his title, others are mournful. Some focus on the recognition that the world is on the edge of apocalypse and that its Indigenous peoples "have moved into a post-dystopian future." Then there is the loss of loved ones to death or separation, the cancers and other diseases that carry away parents and relatives. Throughout, Whitehead is a lyric poet writing in prose, proudly declaring himself to be "transgressive [and] punk"--and, very clearly, a survivor. An elegiac and elegant book of revelations, confessions, and reverberations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.