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What makes a poem in translation? Are human translators still needed in the age of auto-translate technology? Experiment with sound and translation—and craft a sonic poem of your own—in this nontraditional workshop for non-translators and monolinguists.

ABOUT KRISTEN RENEE MILLER

Kristen Renee Miller‘s poems and translations appear in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Offing, and Best New Poets 2018. Her debut translation, Spawn, a poetry collection by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill, is forthcoming in 2020. A recipient of awards and fellowships from The Kennedy Center, The Humana Festival, and The Kentucky Arts Council, Kristen lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the managing editor for Sarabande.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andrée Gill’s poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?

The poet’s young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers’ names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker’s desires, her searching: for fresh water to “take the edge off,” for a “habitable word,” for sex. For her “true north”—her voice and her identity.

Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker’s journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to “make of herself.”