Description
Rebecca Thomas is an award-winning Mi'kmaw poet. She is Halifax's former Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and has been published in multiple journals and magazines. She coordinated the Halifax Slam Poetry team from 2014 to 2017, leading them to three national competitions with the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Her first children's book, I'm Finding My Talk, was a Globe & Mail Top 100 Pick of 2019, as well as a CBC Best Picture Book of 2019, and was nominated for both the 2019 Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children's Literature and the 2019 Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association Best Atlantic-Published Book Award (with companion title I Lost My Talk). The book is a White Ravens 2020 selection, chosen by the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, and has been nominated for First Nations Communities READ 2020. Thomas's first adult collection of poetry, I place you into the fire, was a CBC Best Canadian Poetry pick of 2020.
The intimate follow-up collection to the critically acclaimed I place you into the fire from Mi'kmaw spoken-word poet, Governor General's nominee, and former poet laureate of Kjipuktuk (Halifax).
Make no mistake, we are not ancient or lost.
We are very much here, though at great cost to our kin.
Daughters of the witches they burned?
No. Descendants of the children they refused to return.
Celebrated spoken-word artist Rebecca Thomas's second poetry collection explores the author's various blended identities—as a Mi'kmaw woman, daughter, sister, auntie, wife, student, mentor, activist, poet, friend—as well as her blended family. From complex relationships with parents, navigating illness, memory, and residential school trauma, to rediscovering and rebuilding sibling bonds, to loves both platonic and romantic, Thomas gets right to the beating heart of it all.
Radiating outward, Blended also examines the systemic issues and sociocultural realities that underpin much of Thomas's work. Whether she's exposing the colonial damage caused by Pretendians, protesting government cuts to arts and culture, or celebrating the diverse identities and lived experiences of the People of the Dawn, Thomas's voice is one of fearless wisdom and radical vulnerability, reminding us all of the irrepressible power of the spoken word.