Emily McGiffin’s poems examine imperial violence and colonialism in South Africa and Canada.

Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself.

my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus
what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand

During the five years that Emily McGiffin lived in northwest BC, she became proficient in the fine art of firewood splitting. She holds an MSc from the University of London and has worked and studied in Italy, Sierra Leone and the Philippines. Her poetry, essays, reviews and journalistic articles, widely published in magazines across Canada, have most recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2. Between Dusk and Night, her first poetry collection, was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Toronto where she is a PhD student at York University.

Emily McGiffin's profile page

"Disturbs and delights."—Literary Review of Canada

"Ground-shattering poems...McGiffin’s twofold vision in axe and bayoneted rifle slices the settling and unsettling entries and cadences to past and future continents, as she blades the thickets of land and language."—The Miramichi Reader

“This is a haunting and ambitious book. Emily McGiffin’s precise, stopping-you-in-your-tracks language will hold the reader spellbound as she tracks capital’s lust for command through Africa and the cleared lands of North America.” —Tim Lilburn

“Highly original—a remarkable marriage of political and lyric intelligence.” —Jan Zwicky