This Accident of Being Lost
Songs and Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.
This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love.
A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting “ARE THEY GETTING IT?”; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a stunning collection of poetry, song, and short fiction from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author Betasamosake Simpson (Islands of Decolonial Love), the inaugural recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. These short pieces are darkly humorous, elegantly constructed, and beautifully sorrowful. They include pieces that read like journal entries, science fiction stories, songs, and free-form poems. Regardless of their literary form, these works evoke indigenous heritage connection to the land, and the ways modern indigenous people straddle settler and indigenous worlds. They do not shy away from unflattering descriptions of settlers and settler-indigenous relations, nor do they avoid describing the power imbalance: "Their kids will still be white if they don't have the kind of beach they want. Our kids won't be Mississauga if they can't ever do a single Mississauga thing." The stories are not bleak, and a wry sense of humor glimmers throughout, walking hand in hand with damaged humanity to create a gentleness that combats the sometimes grim subject matter. Betasamosake Simpson explains in the acknowledgements that she wanted to write "unapologetically and truthfully so that I see myself and my community in these pages," a feat she absolutely accomplishes. This is a truly creative and heartfelt work, thoroughly modern in tone and timbre.
