THE FIRST PAGE
Into the Continent
by Emily McGiffin
13 May 2024
The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 20 May 2024, Emily McGiffin launches her new book of poetry, exploring the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space. 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.
the end has come and gone already, charred apocalypse of steel, cotton, mute legions of the midnight shifts pigstick the heaths beyond carbuncle mills, their galling notes of perjury darken the lacklustre morn | taken to extremes and flogged, the moorlands overturn and heave; they arch their broke, despoiled backs, flayed thickets given up for rows of sooty brick | in these excesses, church bells and nine thousand voices raised in mourning strain, their canticles of praise and suffering fitted to the afternoon | what animals there were have gone, fled the utterance, fled damnable pistons, engines, blades, smooth-talking mathematics | brushstrokes falling off the canvas, slumber shudder through the dreams of whiskers, paws and antlers, furred sorrow of retreat | what place for us in these new machinations of a nation’s wealth? o empire!
our animated souls alone and shadowed, our hands
bereft of soil, hearts of titillated dawn
EMILY MCGIFFIN was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations. She’s the author of Between Dusk and Night, shortlisted for the CAA Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, Subduction Zone, winner of the ASLE Creative Book Award, and Of Land, Bones and Money, a book of literary criticism, and the winner of the 2008 RBC Bronwyn Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for poetry. She is a Research Fellow at UCL SELCS
Into the Continent is published with the University of Regina Press and will launch on 20 May 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.
Lead Image (detail) by Tyler Lastovich.
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