Description
Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.
Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak. Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what—and who—is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. Rather than resolving, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those still finding their way home.