Rita Bouvier recommends A Really Good Brown Girl by Marilyn Dumont

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.

Rita Bouvier recommends A Really Good Brown Girl by Marilyn Dumont.

"A Really Good Brown Girl by Marilyn Dumont, published in 1996, winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, is a seminal work that should be read by every Canadian. The voice of this Métis woman is as loving, tender and humane ('wild berries' and 'The Sky is Promising'), as it is powerful, satirical and political ('Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald' and 'Circle the Wagons'). In 2017, the poems still resonate with a life lived in a context and the fallout of a colonialized, racialized and sexualized world. Even so, the closing lines of the last poem, 'we are made of water' ring with hopefulness. Dumont writes, 'I am, as you, made of water.'"

Rita Bouvier is the author of two poetry collections, Blueberry Clouds and papîyâhtak. She has been nominated for several Saskatchewan Book Awards.