Harrowings - Paperback

by Cecily Nicholson (Author)

HARROWINGS takes place mainly in the rural and reconnects with a history of Black intellectual and artistic history in relation to agriculture. The poems include pulses of memoir from the poet's childhood growing up in the country on a farm. These experiences connect to her volunteer work during the recent pandemic, on a local "prison farm" - an agricultural enterprise whose leadership includes people who were formerly incarcerated. Considering movements organizing for food security, and related, resurgent practices, HARROWINGS addresses the work of cultivation. Underlying references include almanacs and Anglo idioms, drawing upon tabular information, weather, and the workings of the sun, moon, and points of stars as may be practical in relation to a localized, growing year. The poems refuse the romance of husbandry, cultivation, and predictive customs. Understanding "the farm" as a tract of colonial advance - tropes of charming and white, tradition and supremacy, are confronted in a study of biome, water, soil, and seed. With love, despite episodic and chronic illness, duress, and dissociative relationships to time - the poetry advances by way of practical tasks such as watering, weeding, and sowing toward abolitionist futures.

Author Biography

Cecily Nicholson is rural, small-town Ontario via Toronto and South Bend, relocated to the Pacific Coast now almost two decades. On Musqueam-, Squamish-, and Tsleil-Waututh-occupied lands known as Vancouver, she worked for many years in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. A part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and a member of the Research Ethics Board for Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Cecily was also the 2017 Ellen Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Triage, From the Poplars, winner of the 2015 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Poetry.