Harrowings - Paperback

by Cecily Nicholson (Author)

Set mainly in the rural, HARROWINGS connects with Black intellectual and art history in relation to agriculture. The poems include pulses of memoir from the poet's childhood growing up on a farm, as well as from more recent pandemic experiences volunteering for a local agricultural enterprise led by people who were formerly incarcerated. Considering movements organizing for food security and related, resurgent practices, HARROWINGS also contends with "the farm" as a tract of colonial advance. Tropes of tradition and supremacy are confronted in this study of biome, plants, and soil. Despite episodic and chronic illness, and by way of practical tasks such as sowing, pruning, and watering, the poetry advances with love towards 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.