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Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the author, Mercedes Eng.
my yt mama
poems
Mercedes Eng
Talonbooks
In the prairies, The Truth is a yt man. The Truth is whatever the yt man says, and whatever truth is said by the yt man is the ruling law of the holy wild wild (prairie) west.
—Lindsay Nixon, nîtisânak (2018)
Whereas looking up the word thunderbird I find descriptors such as
supernatural which I take to mean not a normal thing. Further I find
the thunderbird under a chapter heading Native American Myth and
Legends. Whereas I once attended a summer writing program and
while there a lecture by a poet on Native American myths. As a student
I wanted to stand up at the mic during Q and A to challenge the terms
under which one applies the term myth not to mention legend but I
did not because the line was long because the speaker was well-known
well-respected in other words he was a legend but not a myth. I could
not work myself out from under that power nor what was missing
and in hesitation / the language / my supernatural chapter ended.
—Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (2017)
Contents
1 Cover
3 Contents
4 how my yt settler mama met my Chinese immigrant dad
5 race according to my yt mama/1
6 race according to my yt mama/2
7 Mariah according to my yt mama
10 for me being bipolar isn’t amazing, I just hate it
15 please don’t take me away from her: sue and jane write a story together/3
16 yt prairie mamas and five generations of Ellens
18 yt supremacist beauty standard/1
19 yt supremacist beauty standard/2
20 I got the yt supremacy blues
22 rice
23 potatoes
24 a song for Audra’s Métis mother
25 a song for Audra’s Métis grandmother
27 the crazy things my mother told me when I was a kid
29 the legend of Ky-yo-kosi / Bear Child
30 the legend of the craft brewery of Medicine Hat
32 how my father saw my yt mama
34 how my yt