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On/Me
Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn’t fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness, who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. On/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had.
- GenresPoetryIndigenousCanada
72 pages, Paperback
Published January 21, 2020
4 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
About the author
Francine Cunningham
5 books19 followersFrancine Cunningham is an award-winning Indigenous writer, artist and educator. Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for 2020 BC and Yukon Book Prize, a 2020 Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award.
She is a winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories 2021, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, in Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine and more.
Her debut book of short stories ‘God Isn’t Here Today’ is out now with Invisible Publishing and is a book of Indigenous speculative fiction and horror. You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca
She is a winner of The Indigenous Voices Award in the 2019 Unpublished Prose Category and of The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories 2021, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, in Joyland Magazine, The Puritan Magazine and more.
Her debut book of short stories ‘God Isn’t Here Today’ is out now with Invisible Publishing and is a book of Indigenous speculative fiction and horror. You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 29, 2022
A beautiful collection of poems.
A great resource for teachers that need Indigenous content regarding identity and place.
The book contains content that may be a trigger to some individuals.
A great resource for teachers that need Indigenous content regarding identity and place.
The book contains content that may be a trigger to some individuals.
December 18, 2025
4.5⭐️ rounded up
“we hold in our cells the memories of the water we drink
what memories are we giving it?”
Many poignant points and passages that felt like a punch to the gut or like my lived experiences were stripped bare. I wish I had this book when I was processing my own struggles with my identity when I was younger. Reading Cunningham’s words now is like trudging down a well-traversed path, familiar with the contours of its pain, but I’ve healed and a journey that once felt so arduous now feels a lot easier.
As Cunningham states in the acknowledgements “I wrote this book for anyone who is struggling with their own issues surrounding their identity.” And I second that! If you’re trying to navigate multiple worlds, and come to terms with outsiderness and estrangement, this is a great collection for you.
“we hold in our cells the memories of the water we drink
what memories are we giving it?”
Many poignant points and passages that felt like a punch to the gut or like my lived experiences were stripped bare. I wish I had this book when I was processing my own struggles with my identity when I was younger. Reading Cunningham’s words now is like trudging down a well-traversed path, familiar with the contours of its pain, but I’ve healed and a journey that once felt so arduous now feels a lot easier.
As Cunningham states in the acknowledgements “I wrote this book for anyone who is struggling with their own issues surrounding their identity.” And I second that! If you’re trying to navigate multiple worlds, and come to terms with outsiderness and estrangement, this is a great collection for you.
August 27, 2021
damn. I loved this so much.
August 24, 2020
The poems are good. I spent quite a bit of time trying to claim some kind of image that accurately represents my response to them. What I came up with is a pen-light in a darkened house on a moonless night with no helpful star or street lighting.
Each of these poems is that pen-light hovering over a very small area of a life, a room where the poems live. The little areas of clarity are beautifully vulnerable, but then the light moves on and they return to the darkness. The whole book is like that. It leaves me feeling the irrevocable nature of the invisibility, or perhaps hiddenness of the overall life, the person.
It fits perfectly with the subject matter of the poems and I am tempted to accept that this was intentional, but actually I don’t think so. Rather I get the sense of seizure, as if each poem is an expression of an epilepsy of the soul, that the light turns on by spasm.
I’m an epileptic, and in my experience of it, seizures create a periodicy to time, punctuated by darkness in which everything vanishes, the self, understanding, time, narrative, life. Then the pen light stops, focuses on something, on the bed-side table perhaps, or the book shelf, or the kitchen counter and things appear again, life-like and poignant. The kicker is that - light on - you know that you've been blank, been dark, but you can't surface any memory or frission of experience It is unknowable because there is no one to know it. For this reader, the book is compelling but a bit like a strobe light, uncomfortably close to dangerous.
The experience of time as sporadic, at least for me, has multiple, irrevocable consequences that undermine any attempt at narrative, which, fundamentally, exists inside the belief that there is a coherent timeline even if parts aren’t known to the subject. Someone can know it - god, for example or some Self or Soul. As a reader of poetry, when the norm is this assumption of coherence, I find it difficult to connect to this fundamental assumption. Of course that’s because I don’t experience it that way and never have. I accept on faith that narrative coherence is how others subjectively experience, well – experience. But this book is one of the few that I’ve come across that presents a reality I share, at least in part.
Each of these poems is that pen-light hovering over a very small area of a life, a room where the poems live. The little areas of clarity are beautifully vulnerable, but then the light moves on and they return to the darkness. The whole book is like that. It leaves me feeling the irrevocable nature of the invisibility, or perhaps hiddenness of the overall life, the person.
It fits perfectly with the subject matter of the poems and I am tempted to accept that this was intentional, but actually I don’t think so. Rather I get the sense of seizure, as if each poem is an expression of an epilepsy of the soul, that the light turns on by spasm.
I’m an epileptic, and in my experience of it, seizures create a periodicy to time, punctuated by darkness in which everything vanishes, the self, understanding, time, narrative, life. Then the pen light stops, focuses on something, on the bed-side table perhaps, or the book shelf, or the kitchen counter and things appear again, life-like and poignant. The kicker is that - light on - you know that you've been blank, been dark, but you can't surface any memory or frission of experience It is unknowable because there is no one to know it. For this reader, the book is compelling but a bit like a strobe light, uncomfortably close to dangerous.
The experience of time as sporadic, at least for me, has multiple, irrevocable consequences that undermine any attempt at narrative, which, fundamentally, exists inside the belief that there is a coherent timeline even if parts aren’t known to the subject. Someone can know it - god, for example or some Self or Soul. As a reader of poetry, when the norm is this assumption of coherence, I find it difficult to connect to this fundamental assumption. Of course that’s because I don’t experience it that way and never have. I accept on faith that narrative coherence is how others subjectively experience, well – experience. But this book is one of the few that I’ve come across that presents a reality I share, at least in part.
October 16, 2020
The collection feels like a long walk to ask so many questions, clear the mind, express significant events and honour the life embedded in these stories. It’s a powerful book.
Read
June 5, 2022using the story of how a moth crawled into your mouth and died while you were asleep as a metaphor for coming out of a depression: thoughtful.
February 9, 2025
This was a great little poetry collection with a lot of thought-provoking topics. As with any poetry collection, there were definitely some poems that stood out to me. The topics ranged from depression to identity to playful wonderings about nature.
My favorite poems included: "On God/Signposts", which has a great extended metaphor of how eating a moth can cure depression; "On Love/ Planting", which has a cute little set-up and payoff at the end; "On Tradition/wishes", which has some interesting juxtapositions and musings on language; and lastly, "On Family/Grandmother", which told a heart-wrenching story in a a few short stanzas.
One of the reviews of the back cover mentions that the poems are "quick, stinging hits." I misread it as "singing hits," but I think either could work!
My favorite poems included: "On God/Signposts", which has a great extended metaphor of how eating a moth can cure depression; "On Love/ Planting", which has a cute little set-up and payoff at the end; "On Tradition/wishes", which has some interesting juxtapositions and musings on language; and lastly, "On Family/Grandmother", which told a heart-wrenching story in a a few short stanzas.
One of the reviews of the back cover mentions that the poems are "quick, stinging hits." I misread it as "singing hits," but I think either could work!
July 22, 2024
I don’t normally read books of poetry. But, picked this one up for the VPL Adult Summer Challenge Book Bingo activity. Highly recommend this book. The poems are beautiful and paint a vivid picture of the author’s story.
November 28, 2022
I decided to read this book after seeing one of the poems on the bus (Poetry in Transit). I enjoyed some of the poems, but not all of them.
March 15, 2024
there are some gems on it but also a lot of poems that felt underdeveloped
June 19, 2024
Powerful message in each poem! Trigger warning for some.
December 17, 2022
Francine Cunningham's book demanded my attention as soon as I saw the beautiful cover at my local indie bookstore. I bought it and couldn't put it down! The themes of identity and grief throughout her poems were so powerful and relatable to my own experiences.
I lost a parent to cancer and have also struggled with my own identity being half Venezuelan and not speaking Spanish. Our backgrounds are different, yet it often felt like I was looking in a mirror as I read Francine's poems.
I lost a parent to cancer and have also struggled with my own identity being half Venezuelan and not speaking Spanish. Our backgrounds are different, yet it often felt like I was looking in a mirror as I read Francine's poems.
December 30, 2024
Loved her take on how intergenerational trauma effects her as well as how it feels to be white-passing. Love the different topics she covers from her own life experiences such as family, loss, etc.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews