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The Kenyon Review / The Common / Guernica / The Offing / Lunch Ticket / Tupelo Quarterly / Passages North

Praise for SPAWN

“[T]hese short, untitled poems evoke their setting, the Mashteuiatsh Reserve. . . investigating colonial impact while weaving elements of resilience and chance. The journey of Gill’s lyric speaker is at once relatable in its particulars and distinctively evocative. Miller’s skillful translation makes vivid a landscape and language that will transport readers.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Gill’s elegant, political, and corporeal lines shine in Miller’s skilled translation. Weaving in threads of imperialism and colonization with the longing of adolescence and the search for meaning that permeates life, Spawn explores identity in its myriad manifestations as the young person at its center grows up. This book is delightful and sad, funny and gutting, and so masterfully crafted that it can only be described as a joy to read.”

—Sarah Neilson, Literary Hub

“This collection of poems is exquisite, exploring delicately and deeply the connection between person and place. The elegant and haunting translation into English by Miller deftly manages the translation into another imperialistic language by twisting English, bidding it balloon out and then contract, lifting up solemnity alongside absurdity. The movement within space stills, doubles, and expands explosively all at once like a thunderclap: ‘Only thunderstorms still tell it like it is.’”

—Rachael Daum, American Literary Translators Association

“Spawn shines in its deft language. Things transform easily into others, whether from human to beast, sun to sex, and love to the memory of love. Land becomes raw sexuality, and then sexuality is transformed into sometimes forgettable, sometimes indelible marks on the speaker and on the world around her. . . . The most impressive part of this book is how such few words carry such grand emotions, how the poetry seems to build an entire landscape then touch on every part of its poetic world. The “spawn” seems to be both the poetic voice and the poem itself. Through the lyrical transformations, through the linguistic translation, at the end of the book it was I the reader who felt changed.”

—Clara Altfeld, The Kenyon Review

"In any translation there are three texts: the original, the translation, and the text that exists in the gulf between them. What makes Kristen Renee Miller’s translations of Marie-Andrée Gill so remarkable is the way that third ghost-text seems at times to step into our field of vision. Gill writes: “we bathe in the malaise / of hot asphalt / waiting for a habitable word,” and we feel the tension of translation, of using language at all, our doomed human technology. It’s the hardest thing to capture that frustration in language, much less in translated language, and it’s a little miraculous how it’s rendered throughout Gill’s haunting lyric flares. “I’m just trying to resemble / this ancient water of which I am the child,” she writes, and then there it is in the room with us—the weight of the centuries, the weight of the trying. Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order."

—Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

"Marie-Andrée Gill undertakes in Spawn a poetry of intimacy and estrangement in technicolor: evoking nostalgia for nature as well as Nintendo, her haunting juxtapositions exist in life cycles of commercial possibilities and ecological impossibilities, of postcolonial globalization and indigenous dislocation. Rendered into crystalline English by poet Kristen Renee Miller, Spawn is an unforgettable work of lyricism and cosmic intelligence."

—Katrine Øgaard Jensen, tr. Third-Millennium Heart, winner of the 2018 National Translation Award

"Marie-Andrée Gill’s Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness. Gill’s narrator weaves through their home in Mashteuiatsh and nooks in digital worlds, broken worlds, beautiful worlds, all the while bleeding temporalities into a gallant orality where the northern lights hum with the magnetic fields of Nintendo. Here, the land makes love with the narrator and itself to teach honestly what it means to be held, caressed, and cared for in the most intimate of fashions so that the poems can summon into being a spawn of its own wonderworking dreams: “a woman risen up from all these winter worlds, heaped with ice [and] ready to start again”.

—Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed, winner of the Lambda Literary Award

“In these knotty, intense lyrics, Marie-Andree Gill's Spawn exposes the beauty and cruelty of our fallen, and falling, world. These poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving "the chalky veins" of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle. Kristen Renee Miller's luminous translation gives us a poet who insists on unwinding layers of language—Indigenous and settler, pop-cultural, philosophical, and spiritual—in search of elemental connection: "up close, our animal skin / looks like any other."

—Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood

“For me, [‘Four Poems from Frayer’] tick all the right boxes: Turning my vision of things on its head, questioning the common and defamiliarizing it, they linger with me long after I turn the page.”

—Katherine M. Hedeen, “Why We Chose It,” Kenyon Review

"[‘Six Poems from Frayer’] by Marie-Andrée Gill reads like a rock broken into six pieces. They're formed from the same magmas, they have the same veins and chemistries. . . . They reflect the world around them. A world that has eradicated countless indigenous peoples, to the point where there are fewer and fewer pieces left to join together."

—Andrew Sargus Klein, The Wilds