Each month, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly invites a local author or artist to curate a shelf in the store. This month, we bring you recommendations from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (A Short History of the Blockade, Noopiming)!

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics,  story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

A Short History of the Blockade is the print edition of the 2020 CLC Kreisel Lecture. Her most recent novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies has been widely regarded as some of her most powerful work. She has recently released an album titled Theory of Ice following the path laid by her previous Noopiming Sessions. 

Junie Désil, eat salt | gaze at the ocean

I can’t stop talking about this book. The title is a two step cure for reversing zombification, and Black death, and the collection is a scaffolding of a personal present growing up Haitian in Canada, that becomes meditation on existing in the diaspora through eliminations, extracations, opacities and hypervisibilities.

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

Diaz reflects to us her Aha Makav world in the twenty-first century—one in which rivers are verbs and run through the middle of bodies as well as lands, one in which the hidden world of surveilled wolves resemble the hidden worlds of surveilled Two Spirit and Queer Indigenous experiences, worlds in which “Manhattan is a Lenape word” and a place complete with reparations.

Dear Science, Katherine McKittrick

The academic and intellectual in me, loved Dear Science. It is a study of “how we come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems”, allowing the reader to experience how McKittrick works out “where and how black Thinkers imagine and practice liberation.”

How to Lose Everything, Christa Couture

Christa Couture as a singer songwriter with nine brilliant records to her name, and this book cements her as a writer of books. It is a devastatingly beautiful memoir, in which she swims through unspeakable trauma and loss. 

Surviving the City Part 2, Tasha Spillet

This is the follow up to Tasha Spillet’s groundbreaking first graphic novel, and the story picks up with Dez and Miikwan navigating changing identities, grief, and everything that comes from being Indigenous in the city.

Bleuets et abricots, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Née en 1991 à Baie-Comeau, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine est une Innue de Pessamit. In her third book of poetry, converts her love of land and culture into an Innu poetics that grounded me in calm.

Annie Muktuk et autres histoires, Nora Dunning

This is an incredible book of short stories from Inuit writer Nora Dunning, immersing us in Inuit worlds, thinking and story. I’m grateful to my favorite publisher, Memoire d'encrier for bringing this work to French speaking readers. 

Theory, Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand just won the US Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, which she should have won every year since it has been invented, and is easily the best and most important writer, writing in Canada.

The Dyzgraphxst, Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin just won the US Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry and I’m so excited to witness this recognition early on in her career. The Dyzgraphxst is exceptional - it taught me to read and think in a different register.