John Brady McDonald, MBSFA, a Nêhiyawak-Métis multidisciplinary artist and writer from Treaty Six Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, is an award-winning author of multiple books who has presented at literary festivals around the world. Before all this, however, he was a young, urban Indigenous youth, struggling with addictions, the streets, and the pain and turmoil of intergenerational trauma as a residential school survivor and the child of residential school survivors.
These raw, lyrical poems are a glimpse of the birth of a poet, recklessly using language and words with abandon and without restraint. It is the poetry of an individual experimenting with the language, mixing the influences of Shakespeare and Jim Morrison with the teenage-Goth writing style of youth-the base metals from which a lifetime of words was forged.
Originally published by Kegedonce Press in 2004, The Glass Lodge was presented across Canada and the United States at esteemed festivals. Chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program, it was also nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year in 2005.
Now, here is that seminal work in a brand-new edition, re-edited and restored, illustrated with images of many of the original, handwritten poems, and with author's notes providing frank, fascinating insight into what gave rise to each of these verses: the outpouring of language that marked the birth of a remarkable writer.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Emergence
Perhaps
Carpe
The Bacchus Concerto
Colours
Highwayman
Tainted Nirvana
Bliss of the
Jimmy
St. George of the Road Allowance
Brownstone
Habitue
Rhyme of the Ancient Babylon
Niskwesis
Part Two: Eros
Bagging Tonto
Raleigh
Icarus Amore
Capulet
Hitchhiker
Part Three: Kuskitew Peyesis
Traipse the Razor
Pilgrim's Flawless
Hotbox
Does?
Idylwyld
Nocturne
Purge
Part 4: Renaissance
The Dionysus Sonata
Tashunka Witko
Relapse Discord
Celt
Ness
Britannia
Denoument
Rise
About the Author
About Shadowpaw Press
"The Glass Lodge transcends all the cliches of the angst-ridden Urban Indian. McDonald's verse is a brilliant fusion of the brutality and hope that is inherent in the Aboriginal experience. I have never read poetry that so closely resembles my own experience as a First Nations man." – Darrell Dennis, Writer, Tales of an Urban Indian, Moccasin Flats
