Featuring poetry by Indigenous Poets

From Editor Michelle Poirier Brown

tawâw. Welcome to this gathering. Welcome to these pages. Welcome to these
poems.
I have been living with these poems, and others with them, for several months now. I think you, too, will find them rich companions.
These are intimate poems. They each take you to a specific place, vivid, scented, and full of sound. Tires scream against blacktop in an empty parking lot, a howl on a landscape disruption; a visit to the res calls to mind what your own tongue feels like when you make your way all the way back to the words you heard in childhood. Under a starlit sky, we confront the cold-hearted truth of colonialism. We sit at a laden table. Landscapes are intertwined with memories, provide the basis of our identity, lay bare our heart, grant us relief.
A crow feather pierces, raven sees right through us. Collected for the League of Canadian Poets’ 2026 Poem in Your Pocket program, these are accomplished poems. Set in quatrains, scored against white space, they offer lessons in both assonance and form (ekphrastic, glosa, lineated prose). They are poems worth study, both for their craft and their call to humanity.
Enjoy.

With poems from Elena Bentley, Kihêw Flamont, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Connor Lafortune, D.A. Lockhart, Sarah Sands Phillips, Douglas Sinclair and Alycia Two Bears.