Emily McGiffin’s poems examine imperial violence and colonialism in South Africa and Canada.

Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself.

my body an ark

carrying successors like a chambered nautilus

what i was placed here to do

ferry the unborn

across the inhospitable land

make a bed amid the thornbush

make a tea table, forge the domestic

bliss of my country

raise them as heirs

draw our lineage in the sand