Vulnerable and, of course, poetic. I found this to be a really compelling read, especially when narrated. There is a frank mode of explanation that speaks of lived experience growing up as a gay indigenous man in Canada, and how our society and culture directly affect him on a day-to-day basis.

Topics range, and don’t feel like they have too much of a through line. The structure is probably the weakest link here, for me. But quite a few of these struck home and were quite moving. It’s well written, though uneven at times. I found it to be quite solid and comparable to other collections, where perhaps not everything discussed will be of interest or correlate to what was said previously, but I imagine there is something here for anybody to relate to.

I think it might be a mixed bag for people in so far as how often he brings up other authors and their work, and how he relates to the work. He’s fairly alright at giving summaries of things discussed, but it’s obviously difficult and abstract if you haven’t read them yourself. I generally don’t like this kind of short hand… but neither is it un substantive. Fortunately I had read some of the references and in some cases it made me think a bit differently about them.

Plenty here to recommend. For some reason I thought this was a poetry collection and so I’d been putting it off. Must have conflated it with something else. Well worth a read.