she is reading her blanket with her hands
I am humbled by the women and girls in my world, and I thank the great spirit for their presence. my métis grandmother, germaine proulx-boyce, taught me to embroider, to work with ribbon. I’m told I have hers and exilda dufort-lafrance, my great-great grandmother. I’ve passed these hands to my daughter, barb, and to my granddaughters, jessinia and mazie. these hands of mine love to write, and I’m told my great grandmother, rosina lafrance-proulx, was a poet, that she talked to the trees, to the plants and animals. and now she talks to me. more than fifteen years ago, rosina’s voice in mine, I woke up to the words “she is reading her blanket with her hands,” the birthing of the poems in this book.
Reviews
Sharron Proulx-Turner mixes an amiable prose with a verse so free it gets downright trickstery to unfold the small talk impulses behind the familial and the familiar into songs and meditations, prayers and autobiography. In the process, her notes dedicated to family and friends also reveal and revel in large chunks of the Canadian landscape and re-inscribe in those natural places figures that history erased, the figure of the particular contemporary Metis girl, woman, mother and grandmother she herself was and is, sitting centred on the blanket and “inviting anyone awake/ to take the chance/a lifetime of dreaming our selves/one small bird at a time.” ~Daniel David Moses
