Calling It Back to Me - by Laurie D Graham (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A poet's clear-eyed witnessing of familial history, this is the most personal collection yet from two-time Trillium Book Award finalist Laurie D. Graham.

In these searching, spare, and resonant poems, Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandparents' lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This collection's fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail, reflect a family's knowledge broken by global immigration and memory loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.

With tender curiosity and a determination to bear unflinching witness, Calling It Back to Me asks: When language and memory are so tenuous, what is it that gets passed down between generations?

Review Quotes

"'I miss the lives / I have not lived, ' writes Laurie Graham and an unrelenting, tender, brave historical introspection begins. She looks especially for the four great-grandmothers, those homestead lives, and is struck repeatedly by their unknowability which over time has become what she is, the same gait, same brow, same don't-cross-me streak. The trail to the dead is snow packed and often disappears entirely. This is a moving book of desire, identity, homage and remorse."
--Tim Lilburn, author of The Names

About the Author

LAURIE D. GRAHAM grew up in Treaty 6 territory, near amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she has lived in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg, since 2018, where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education, and her third and most recent book, Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario's Trillium Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthologies.