full-metal indigiqueer: poems

by Joshua Whitehead

Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Queer, LGBT, Canada, Nonfiction, Race

120 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2017

About the author

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit storyteller and academic from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Indigenous literatures and cultures at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory. His most recent book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, was shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. In 2016, his poem “mihkokwaniy” won Canada’s History Award for Aboriginal Arts and Stories (for writers aged 19–29), which included a residency at the Banff Centre. He has been published widely in Canadian literary magazines such as Prairie Fire, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Red Rising Magazine, and Geez Magazine’s Decolonization issue.

Reviews

[Kiki]

this is hypercyberrezsphere
where decolonialism has a chance
where survivance rests its head

well. after the last few poems made me sob over my fruitcake and tea breakfast, all I can type is that in order to wa[l]k[e] in this created decolonial wor[l]ds Whitehead broke their things and it was uglybeautiful. ❤️

[Fraser Simons]

Even for a laymen with poetry, I thought this was really great and a lot more accessible than some reviewers would have you believe. I guess it helps knowing a lot of cyberpunk and l33t speak, for the beginning, and just having consumed a lot of media/pop culture.

There is a birthing sequence at the start paralleling Ghost in the Shell that sort of sets up the parameters of the collection. What is the identity that runs the “programs”/poems. What is the lens, essentially. Each poem usually has a start line of code that says what this examines and there is a long list at the back of the book of references. So sometimes when it says it’s running a decolonial program of whatever, say Whitman, you can actually flip back and see the references and see how it’s subverting it and applying a different lens.

I think it’s really, really clever. Some of it went over my head and some of it felt a bit disjointed and outside of the initial theme. Like when it isn’t running a program and randomly has something else. But much of it feels cohesive and truly unique. Especially for cyberpunk, which is too often claimed as a white space with so many marginalized people working in the space back when it began, but still. Now. This only further proves that. It’s fertile ground, this sub genre.

I hope to one day get Misha’s book of indigenous cyberpunk poetry; I know it’s the first one, but seems pretty unobtainable every time I search for it. I bet that book and this book would be in an interesting conversation.

[Magdelanye]

two spirit full metal
indigiqueer
balancing
extremes that fluctuate
between altered states
love and rage
twitching just beneath the (red)skin
retching dynamite
blowing minds

PLUS 5 stars for the cover

[Nicki]

This collection was amazing. I loved the concrete format, the Nêhiyawewin and the honesty. If you read one poetry book this year, read this.

[David]

5/5 Quel recueil! Je ne sais pas quoi dire vraiment. C’est pas tant des poèmes, mais chaque pièce est une œuvre d’art. C’est cru, c’est vrai. Un très grand talent.

[Ai Miller]

So, incredibly, incredibly good. So many parts of these poems were like getting hit in the throat, especially in the later half, and the form that Whitehead uses is so powerful and intriguing. I want like everyone to read this. At first the form felt intimidating, but VERY quickly I got over that and got into the flow. It's just so much--the poems are beautiful and harrowing, intellectual and also so visceral all at the same time. Just incredible work. Please read this.

[Laura]

Brilliant and challenging and important. I don't really have the vocabulary to talk about poetry well and don't read it too often, but this collection is so well done. I picked it up having read some of Whitehead's other work (short fiction) and am glad I did.
content warnings: violence, murder, misogyny, heterosexism, colonial violence, sexual violence, gender-based violence, racism

[Amanda]

these poems make me ache with love and sadness. they are genius fuck yous to the literary canon, to colonialization. they are Zoa's neon heart and timelessness, memories as open wounds.

[Emily]

These poems were touching & clever, however they started to get repetitive about half way through the collection with too many pop culture references. This collection could have been edited down by at least 30% and be much stronger.

[Daniel]

This was more of an experience than a book. Whitehead inspects the world through a critical eye that makes the reader feel the experiences he conveys. Some mature themes, but I would recommend this collection to anyone.

[Jane Mulkewich]

Such richness here; an intense feast of words and ideas in these poems. We read and discussed this book in my book club tonight, and I am glad we have an English scholar in our club who can help us to appreciate the full depth of this work, for example it is not that Whitehead references the Faerie Queene (published in 1590)... he inhabits her and explodes her! My favourite poem is “mihkokwaniy”, such a powerful piece about his grandmother, which won Canada’s History Award for Aboriginal Arts and Stories. Whitehead's goodreads bio notes that this book was shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, but what it does NOT say is that he refused the award, and you can read his letter about it here: https://www.tiahouse.ca/joshua-whiteh...... and this letter is also rich with so many quotable lines: "I think of myself like I think of my home, manitowapow, the strait that isn’t straight, fluid as the water, as vicious as the rapids on my reservation, as vivacious as a pickerel scale. I come from a nation that has survived because of sex and sexuality, as post-contact nations that deploy sex ceremonially." and "I must withdraw my name and stories from this wonderful nomination because it is not my space to occupy—occupation being a story I know all too well." I wavered on whether to give this book a 4 or a 5 because it is somewhat inaccessible and difficult to read - certainly difficult to read quickly - it is best taken one poem at a time to allow time for digestion... and as a settler on Turtle Island I am struck by the very last words in the book, at the end of the acknowledgements, which say: "& to all settlers who wish to continue appropriation hereIamhereIamhereIam."

[ianridewood is on Storygraph]

A totally mind-bending collection of anti-colonial biopunk poetry that roots itself in the land (and its poisoning) and cyberfuturism (by way of Indigenous two-spirited ways of knowing). A truly unique and unforgettable experience.

[Lancakes]

Review to come, if I can ever get my thoughts together on how fucking incredible this writing - this art - is. I'm so glad I have this library book indefinitely (a quarantine silver lining), so I can reread at my leisure.

[Leah Horlick]

There needs to be way to make this required reading for anyone from Saskatchewan in particular.

[Juliana]

**read for my queer lit class
mind-boggling, creative, and inspiring

[Tina]

So good!!

[Tasha Swingendonk]

I want to revisit this collection with more immersion. I read a few poems here and there over months and appreciated them, but I think I lost something in the time between.

[Rowen H.]

There is truly nothing else like this book

[Dr. Devine]

A stunning collection of poems that provide insight on the modern 2-Spirit experience and modern Indigenous issues.

[Becky]

Wow. This collection stunned me. I fell in love with Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and it was so exciting to follow that trail to this gorgeous, experimental? poetry collection, which makes bold intentional choices in everything from punctuation and spacing to their absence. Reading the back of the book granted additional insight into the plot of this collection and the character that ties the poems together. I’m not sure how well that came across in my initial reading of the collection but I loved the read nonetheless.⁣

[Gina Im]

No rating. It doesn't feel fair to give such a personal collection of poems a rating. Definitely the most experimental work of poetry I've ever read.

[kell_xavi]

An experimental, theoretical, postmodern decolonizing f** poet’s kind of poetry. A bit of Jordan Abel and a bit of Tommy Pico.

this is the conversation every queer NDN must have / the impetus …/ between love and colonialism:/ “hey baby, can you love the ‘me’ that hates the ‘we’/ of which your ‘i’ is bound to[question mark]”

I highly recommend going to any reading by Joshua Whitehead. I bought this book at one, and bought Jonny Appleseed at another: his command of the texts he’s penned is so strong, and his readings bring out both the profundity and the humour of his stories and references.

This recording is a great entry into Full Metal Indigiqueer, and brings out the cheek and poignance of “id say ‘ill be back’ but i never intend to leave”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UWPbyg1...

For me, listening to these poems does something more than reading them can. On the page, these poems are debris that pile up into stories, allegories, allusions. Benjamin’s angel, swept backward by the wind of history, is present here; there often doesn’t seem to be a why? to what is referenced or how. So many disparate parts create… something.

I’m not sure that it’s an entirely successful project, and he’s said that he doesn’t know that he’s really a poet, but Whitehead clearly put in a lot of effort and gave the collection his all.

My favourite lines, in “things we lost in the fire/water”:

a tiny moth
writhes in the storm
fierce winds & rainwater
dissolve the scales
that drip like semen
from its skin;
weighty leaves jiggle
reserve dew
thin black bow
scratches on the glass
of a trailer
burning
in the yard


Others I liked well:

what I learned in pre-cal math
april 5: pass[hang]over
can you be my full-time daddy
“d” pairs well with vowels
mihkokwaniy

[Claire]

Can’t get enough of the formatting, non-letter characters and images, and overall prose of this book/collection. I don’t feel I have anything meaningful to add to the conversation on this work’s deconstruction of indigenous life and (de)colonialism, but it’s all presented in a wonderfully engaging way. I like to think I’m good at following more experimental writing styles, and this was a particularly interesting one to tackle, given the multitude of ways to read any one given sequence of letters and figures that may form words (or even sentences!). I also really appreciate the list of “sources” for the cultural references littered throughout (which really help sell the more colonialized side of the narrative voice), as it made me realize just how well some were integrated for even works I love to go right over my head (I popped off the second I saw Akira reference though). Overall a great read if you’re up to the task- though it is more accessible than it may seem at first, given time and patience.

[Anne]

I enjoyed this collection of poems a lot more than I thought I was going to. Whitehead uses a lot of digital language in these poems as well as other unconventional poetic devices, which was intimidating at first, but as I got used to the style it was less so. He uses a lot of Canadian pop-culture references I’m unfamiliar with as well as indigenous words and cyber lingo that is new to me, so I haven’t fully appreciated all this collection has to offer, but even still I found plenty to engage with. I am most delighted by his fantastically clever wordplay and his use of the Western literary canon to subvert expectations and write against settler colonialism and all the damage that comes with that. His experimentation with form adds so much meaning, and I will be thinking on the ideas he’s presented here for quite some time.

[Eric]

Oh YES. One of the absolute best back-cover summaries of a book that I've ever read, and the book itself delivers, and then some. Brilliant decolonizing and indigenizing of various icons of western lit, including Shakespeare and Spenser (the Faerie Queene poem is one of my favorites), and here as well as in his great novel Jonny Appleseed, Whitehead is doing really important things and giving readers like me so much to think about. Yay!

[ActuallyReadBooks]

Joshua Whitehead is badass, with language like twin-pistols and impeccable aim. If you haven't read this book yet, you need to correct that and give this collection however long it takes for you to read it cover to cover.

[jo ianni]

Did you ever think, 'things could be very different and that's okay'? Read this then.

[Eileen]

Josh's writing is the future. Heartbreaking and regenerative and so very necessary.

[Cameron Mitchell]

Read this.

[Laura]

Brilliant