Heating the Outdoors

You're the clump of blackened spruce that lights my gasoline-soaked heart It's just impossible you won't be back to quench yourself in my creme-soda ancestral spirit Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andre Gill. In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in her interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate Gill's interior landscapeof heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting lightamidst the boreal geography. Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Quebecoise woman.