Poems for a New World

Poems for a New World

by Connie Fife

$13.95

  • Autumn 2001
  • ISBN 978-0-921870-90-6 (0-921870-90-6)
  • 5-1/4″ x 7-5/8″ Trade Paperback, 88 pages
  • Poetry, Native Studies, Women’s Studies



Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a transforming force for people of all colours so that they may breathe the air of freedom, the air of a world rich in biodiversity.

Revolutionary as they may be, these poems also care about language, about how language can become the food and joy of life. As she says, “I have prepared a bowl of ripened poems / with which to ease our hunger,” placed an “empty gourd” beside the bed of love which waits “to be filled by our stories carried / across the heartlands of distance we will have travelled.” These are poems of revolution, of love, of inspiration.

Click here to read an excerpt from Poems for a New World.

Reviews:

Poems for a New World pulses with an erotic politics that will take you into new countries of the flesh and mind.”
—Jeanette Armstrong

“Connie’s songs will transport you on a beautiful journey into the soul of a powerful and passionate Cree woman.”
—Chrystos

“Listen well. You’ll hear the blossoming of a tree born from the parts of a broken heart.”
—Joy Harjo