The All + Flesh is a sophisticated debut work. Those two adjectives reveal two key facets of these poems, and the collection: there’s the often-playful experimentation with form that speaks to a young poet searching for their style and voice. It is both exciting and unsettling, as we can never quite pin Bird down to find a workable entry point into their individual poems through a consistent use of form. Bird compensates richly for this dis-ease with their sophisticated interlinking of central themes and tropes: a persistent refusal of conventional structures; the complex relationship with religion; the awareness of the posthuman and the interconnectedness of life forms; the loss (and recovery) of language, identity, and culture as a result of colonization; the devastating intergenerational consequences of colonial policies on the fabric of Indigenous life; and the ability to find, and cling to, hope despite everything.
The opening poem, “Poem for white people,” circles a point that need not be made, and yet must be made: colonizers took more than just land. As they took the land, they left behind fragments of what was—broken families, erased family stories and traditions, and a legacy of betrayal upon betrayal that continues still. From these shards, Brandi Bird reconstructs their sense of belonging and identity, and even finds hope and—dare I say it?—love.
Bird manages to control the spiral into complete erasure through language and a conscious focus on regaining the health of their body. In “A glossary of illness,” they write, “Degradation is the decline of empires, or just one body.” Their concern is to regain autonomy of their body and to reverse the spiral, and they accomplish this with skill by connecting their sense of being not just to a state of physical and mental wellness, but to an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Later in the same poem, they write,
at school / the farmer’s daughter / always said / that a pig’s lung / could be her lung too. I knew even then that we breathe the same way, can transplant our organs to each other & become new animals.
It is this transhuman, panoptic view that provides hope and frames the words in The All + Flesh as sustenance that will nurture a better future.
From the vantage point of experience, Bird looks back at their younger self and their fascination with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Like Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, Bird is now troubled by Plath’s depictions of the Other, and grows into a realization that Esther Greenwood’s ennui is a quintessentially white experience, and that it is a luxury they, as an Indigenous person, are not afforded. We need a different language to depict Indigenous experience, and Brandi Bird’s The All + Flesh is a strong contribution to finding that language and that voice.
While the subject matter of The All + Flesh is dark, I was struck throughout by how much hope there is in Bird’s writing, and by the gorgeous and subtle ways in which they cycle back to the central ideas that bind the collection together. Over and over again, time is suspended in the poems, and in this state of timelessness, we are able to transcend the limitations of western linearity and thought and to reconnect with relationships that have been stunted or lost. This is an invigorating, liberating read.
BRANDI BIRD is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples. Bird’s poems have been published in Catapult, The Puritan, Room Magazine, and others. They are a fourth-year BFA student at the University of British Columbia, but their heart is always yearning for the prairies.
- Publisher : House of Anansi Press (Aug. 8 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 96 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1487011822
- ISBN-13 : 978-1487011826
