my yt mama. Mercedes Eng

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      Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the author, Mercedes Eng.

my yt mama

       poems

      Mercedes Eng

      Talonbooks

In the prairies, The Truth is a yt man. The Truth is whatever the yt man says, and whatever truth is said by the yt man is the ruling law of the holy wild wild (prairie) west.

      —Lindsay Nixon, nîtisânak (2018)

      Whereas looking up the word thunderbird I find descriptors such as

      supernatural which I take to mean not a normal thing. Further I find

      the thunderbird under a chapter heading Native American Myth and

      Legends. Whereas I once attended a summer writing program and

      while there a lecture by a poet on Native American myths. As a student

      I wanted to stand up at the mic during Q and A to challenge the terms

      under which one applies the term myth not to mention legend but I

      did not because the line was long because the speaker was well-known

      well-respected in other words he was a legend but not a myth. I could

      not work myself out from under that power nor what was missing

      and in hesitation / the language / my supernatural chapter ended.

      —Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (2017)

      Contents

      1  Cover

      2  Title Page

      3  Contents

      4  how my yt settler mama met my Chinese immigrant dad

      5  race according to my yt mama/1

      6  race according to my yt mama/2

      7  Mariah according to my yt mama

      8  mood disorder

      9  dual diagnosis

      10  for me being bipolar isn’t amazing, I just hate it

      11  the places we come from/0

      12  the love songs I couldn’t listen to during a research trip back “home” to finish this book on the land on which I first fell in love, for fear that I would have a breakdown

      13  our journeys through cities as they existed for us when we were young and in love: sue and jane write a story together/1

      14  if only we had known about Chrystos and her poem “White Girl Don’t”: sue and jane write a story together/2

      15  please don’t take me away from her: sue and jane write a story together/3

      16  yt prairie mamas and five generations of Ellens

      17  Chinese and yt grandmas

      18  yt supremacist beauty standard/1

      19  yt supremacist beauty standard/2

      20  I got the yt supremacy blues

      21  my beauty standard

      22  rice

      23  potatoes

      24  a song for Audra’s Métis mother

      25  a song for Audra’s Métis grandmother

      26  a song for my yt mama

      27  the crazy things my mother told me when I was a kid

      28  the places we come from/1

      29  the legend of Ky-yo-kosi / Bear Child

      30  the legend of the craft brewery of Medicine Hat

      31  why u staring?

      32  how my father saw my yt mama

      33  how I saw my yt mama

      34  how my yt