Motherhood, trauma, and familial history are woven together into a powerful collection from the award-winning author of What Became My Grieving Ceremony.

Beginning with a revelation of familial sexual abuse, Building a Nest from the Bones of My People charts the impact of this revelation on the speaker. From the pain of estrangement to navigating first-time motherhood in the midst of a family crisis, Morgan explores the complexities of generational and secondary abuse, intertwined as they are with the impacts of colonization.

Cara-Lyn Morgan's profile page

• Winner, Fred Cogswell Award for Poetic Excellence

Cara-Lyn Morgan comes from both Indigenous (MeItis) and Immigrant (Trinidadian) roots in the place known as Turtle Island and Canada. She was born in Oskana, known now as Regina, Saskatchewan, and lives, works, and gardens, in the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of the Credit peoples. Her debut collection of poetry, What Became My Grieving Ceremony, won the 2015 Fred Cogswell Award for Poetic Excellence. Her second collection, Cartograph, explores healing, cultural duality, and colonization. Find out more at >"

"Cara-Lyn Morgan offers not only loss, grief, and anger in this powerful collection, but also resolve, resistance, and reckoning—with the past, with what we bequeath our children, and the intentionality of those decisions. A brilliant and resonant meditation on becoming a mother and what it takes to build a new nest from the salvage of what’s been given to us. 'Burn the sage. / we’re done.'"—Lisa Bird-Wilson, author of Probably Ruby

"With her new collection, Cara-Lyn Morgan, demonstrates the lyrical alchemy of transforming ancestral pain into poetic gold through the unflinching art of truth-telling. These poems are raw as nerve endings, encapsulating wisdom enduring as teeth and bones. They are tender, well-crafted, and fearless—reminding us how speaking out into stifling silence can create muscle strong enough to move a woman from fearful mourning to courageous motherhood.Through Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, the pain of the past is excavated like an aching, crooked bone—rebroken to set the future on firm footing. Smoldering embers of generational trauma are doused, ghosts are set to rest and the seeds of hope begin to blossom. We can all heal. With this hauntingly beautiful collection, Morgan shows us how."—Andrea Thompson, author of A Selected History of Soul Speak