Tyler Pennock

Conceived in the same world as Pennock’s first two
books of poetry, Bones and Blood, Skin is the final
book in a trilogy that centres a contemporary 2-spirit
Indigenous person’s experiences.

A haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory,
where memory, place, and loss intertwine, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers
poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those
still finding their way home.

“What if home is a cemetery erased by floods, where so many layers of
erasure have taken place that it is nearly impossible to speak of oneself or
of one’s community? Tyler Pennock invents a language in which to do so,
one made of rapid, defamiliarized English and a newly re-acquired Cree,
a language of blueberries in the freezer, crushed cigarette butts in a coffee
cup, kittens appearing unexpectedly beneath a trailer porch. This is a book
of looking through skin, of returning on a radically shifted topography,
of love and of rage all residing together to reconstruct a livable home
beneath which the dead still remember the coming generations.”
— Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century and Iron Goddess of Mercy