This stellar debut collection by Métis poet Diana Hope Tegenkamp takes us through many worlds and wonders. In Girl running, we find solace and outrage, grief and tenderness, bewilderment and beauty, all “entangled in hope and dreaming.” The poet’s love of the natural world is both earthy and adamantine, and her passion for literature and art is just as rich a source for her questioning eye.

On the edge of Saskatoon, a woman opens a car door and flees. A child runs away from residential school after a beating. A Métis man’s ghost gallops on a ghost horse across the prairies. Henry James’ 19th-century heroine, Isabel Archer, runs across a wintery yard. Lana Tisdel drives away from Falls City, Nebraska, after the murder of her transgender boyfriend.

After many losses—of a mother known and loved, of a Métis father unknown and imagined—the ‘girl’ of this collection is running towards and away from mortality. In these poems, disappearances, perpetual flights, river walks, shadowy descents and miraculous returns connect daily living and mortality, current social realities and ancient histories, the surface and the subterranean depths of our complicated lives. Lovers of contemporary Canadian poetry will find that this textured collection rewards reading and rereading.

Diana Hope Tegenkamp is a Métis writer who lives and creates on Treaty 6 Territory, Homeland of the Métis. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals across Canada, including CV2, Grain, and Matrix, to name a few. In 2020, she was awarded second prize in the Banff Centre Bliss Carmen Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.

Diana works across mediums, including film, photography, visual art, performance art, sound and music. Her video performance piece, UNMUTE, was selected for SLANT’s 2021 Writing Bodies festival, and more of her multi-disciplinary work, including film poems for Girl running, can be found on her website, www.dianahopetegenkamp.com. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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