CJ’s Reviews > A History of My Brief Body > Status Update

“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.”

“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.”