Janet Rogers on why you should read the poetry collection Burning in This Midnight Dream

June is Indigenous Book Club Month. CBC Books will publish a recommendation each day from an Indigenous writer for a book written by another Indigenous author. 

Janet Rogers recommends Burning in This Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe.

"A maven of language; her own Cree language and English poetics, Louise Halfe writes from a place of honour and integrity and that is constant. She has, in the past played with characters of her legends twisting them into experimental pieces creating new stories from her unique place of cultural authority. In Burning in This Midnight Dream, Halfe shares with us her bravest work to date. She has dug out, from deep inside herself, the cancerous and disturbing tissue from where her dysfunctional realities are born. It is a poetry collection of residential school experiences that inspires understanding, shocks with satisfying truth and opens our own wounds for healing to begin. Louise Bernice Halfe is a matriarch of Indigenous literature and is an 'Auntie' to many Indigenous writers who have come after her. With this collection she continues to lead, and provide permission for us all to do the extremely hard work necessary to put ourselves back together after colonial disturbances. I asked Louise who she thought she would be if our Indigenous realities weren't disrupted, and she replied 'I'd be a very good savage.'"

Janet is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from Six Nations. She was born in Vancouver and has lived as a guest on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people (Victoria, B.C.) since 1994. Her fifth poetry collection, Totem Poles & Railroads, was released in 2017.