Undoing Hours

Selina Boan’s debut poetry collection charts an expansive journey into nêhiyawêwin, a language which opens up new perspectives for the “girl between two dialects” who “clicks beginner /cree on the internet.” In Undoing Hours (Nightwood Editions), Boan offers her community solace: “if you are hurting / if you are uncertain/ know that this body / can hold / itself to itself and undo at the same time.” In wildly enjambed, fragmented forms, these poems confront oppressive settler colonial ideologies by making space for “a shape of history denied so many times,” deploring how “violence / forms a country.” With writing that is playful, frank and inventive, she illustrates how language and time—even the microcosm of a word or an hour—are tethered to a way of seeing the world. For Boan, time is rather “a circle, in parallel, all at once.” This book, charged with tenderness and grit, also maps ...