CJ > Recent Status Updates

“To be compelled to write beautifully about unbeautiful matters is a minor miracle, but it’s also to declare that the world has been poured onto me and that anyone within earshot has the power to wield a word like a match.”

“There’s dizzying evidence of the unlivability of Canada wherever one looks. That NDN kids, NDN women and men, queer and trans NDNs, are all enticed by the freedom of non-existence is an ethical problem at the core of Canadian modernity.”

“I’m ravenous for the future, but my longings are incompatible with the available versions of it. Bummer.”

“Do you know how mindless I’ve been about where I plant my feet? The manner in which I stand determines whether I’m a statue or a monument.”

“Love is the act of ramming headfirst into the window of an ‘I’.”

“If nothing else, a sustained loneliness thrusts one into a moral position: to be emptiness animated or personified is to be a two-legged warning sign.”

“Why poetry? It allows for a romance of the negative that doesn’t foreclose the possibility of a non-cruel kind of optimism.”

“If I try to compose anything but sad poems, I fear it’ll be akin to a widower trying to convince others that he has found happiness again by wearing a T-shirt that says HAPPINESS.”

“The question I’d ask: What might it look like for NDNs to refuse life in the wake of all that’s happened to us in a country in which we’re social experiments before all else?”

“I ask, How do you know you love me? He doesn’t answer. Later he gives me a cheap-and-dirty response from the bargain bin of capitalist feeling—I love you because you do so much for me.”

“So many world-shattering things can happen in the schism between an event and our ability to comprehend it.”

“A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization. No one will look at me adoringly and because of this I will be freed from the sovereign’s clenched fist…To be a bad girl is to be alive against the odds, a screeching question. Let me be a bad girl.”

“Once the state manufactured a monopoly on grief, the marginalized went on embarrassing the privileged with our buckling, bullet-holed knees.”

“Teens don’t read for beauty, but to practise the art of disappearance. Today, I read and write for beauty, and live so as to disappear.”

“Let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.”

“Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.”