Tongues and interpretation (poems)

Abstract

Tongues and Interpretation is a poetry manuscript that explores the effects of growing up in a religious household where one is left to navigate the aftermath of conservative, dualistic thinking on one's experience with the environment, gender, and culture. This collection focuses intensely on the material world while also skirting along the edge of scripture and myth, engaging with sacred stories not to discount them, but to digest them with levity, grief, and reverence. It examines the images and memories of a childhood where moose hearts floated in Tupperware and rabbits hung, skinned, in the basement; where children spent Sundays in ancient texts that brimmed with violence and devotion and weekdays deep in turr feathers and cod guts. The collection engages with ideas of creation and decreation, rewilding the body, and unsettling religious text — listening to and speaking with the tongues of feminism, hunting, Sunday dinners, plastic pollution, evangelicalism, body politics, and Newfoundland folklore. Tongues and Interpretation explores the grotesque and the beautiful, making a case for the reverence needed amid revulsion and blurring the line between the sacred and profane in a bid to call humans into a better relationship with all animate/inanimate objects and human/nonhuman beings of the world.