Blood

Blood is a poetry collection about a Two-Spirit Indigenous speaker living in the city, where queerness, dreams, memories and family ties all press on everyday life. It is set in the same world as Tyler Pennock's first book, Bones. At the start, the speaker struggles to tell closeness apart from hurt, and the poems follow their attempts to understand what it means to desire and to be wanted.

Through longing, intimacy and Anishinaabe ways of relating, the collection reconsiders the speaker's bond with the living world, including non-human relatives. It looks at how deep history shows up in ordinary moments and asks how one person might push back against the effects of that history. Pennock shows that Indigenous people carry the consequences of colonial history and keep working through them.

The imagery turns on seasons and elements: spring and winter, ice and water, things that are still and things beginning to move. The book is especially concerned with what emerges during the thaw.