Message Sticks by Josphine Bacon and translated by Phyllis Aronoff

This is poetry from Canada.

Message Sticks by Josphine Bacon translated by Phyllis Aronoff is published by Mawenzi House. This is a Book originally written in Innu-aimun. This was published in 2013.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781927494097E12.

Message Sticks, by Josphine Bacon and translated by Phyllis Aronoff from Innu-aimun, brings Innu-aimun-language poetry from Canada into English through Innu-aimun presence, Indigenous memory, and message-making across land, language, and colonial pressure. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for sticks, message, land, and the material act of carrying language through history, not as a fixed lesson about Canada. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Message Sticks belongs in the translated poetry library because it broadens the library’s language map through Indigenous North American poetry.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.