In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.

Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published three collections of poetry—Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. It was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, and the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, and was longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She is the editor of an anthology of fantasy short stories titled Maiden Mother and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes. She has been a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada, and her personal essay, "A Body Like A Home," was the Gold Prize Winner for the National Magazine Awards in Personal Journalism. She is also currently editing a book of creative nonfiction, trans girl in love. day/break is her fourth book of poetry. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Gwen Benaway's profile page

Praise for Holy Wild:

ninanâskomitin katawasisin kîya ômac âcimowinak: I am so grateful for your beautiful stories, Gwen! Her narrator, like the phoenix she breathes life into, rises into a fully emblazoned piyêsîs that etches out space--in both the whiteness of queerness and the very muds and waters that birth us--for 2SQ and trans Indigenous livelihoods and literatures. This is a heart wrenching, thought provoking, honest, and graceful walkthrough of trans realities both on the homeland and in urban settings. As Benaway notes, "creation opens around [language]" in Holy Wild and as she holds our hands through story, she "wash[es] away layers" from stones ruddy with sediment; and she too "broke open the world to let [us] step into it." This book is a birthing of a body, in all of its varied meanings, which is always a promise "wild in [its] convergence[s]." ay-hay, nisâkihitowin awa. &mdashJoshua Whitehead, author of Full-Metal Indigiqueer and Johnny Appleseed

"Holy Wild! Holy Gwen! I think of this collection with an exclamation point! "[T]he only word for this is love." And, this book is filled with love--stunning, beautiful, complicated love--love of language, love of bodies, love of love, the hard-won love of self, and more, so much more. As the poet says, "they want one thing and I am many." This book is many things, and we are grateful. --Katherena Vermette, author of the award-winning novel The Break

"In Holy Wild, Benaway sounds forth a chorus of pronouncements that look something like I am "x," where "x" is at once unavailable to some and ever-proliferating: "this is what makes us holy / even if we are the only ones / who know it." It is in this refusal of singularity that Benaway conjures trans life in a place that is both prior to and in excess of the violence that mires it. "[T]he first day of forever" is forever, is recursive, is softness, is an intimate life outside of the wrath of men who spoil the categories we install hope in, but, above all else, it is the emotional infrastructure for something like freedom. Let Benaway lead you there. --Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound is a World