About the Book
Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
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About the Author :
jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate, and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hopes of creating utopia. Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Editions, 2021) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English.
Review :
"jaye simpson's a body more tolerable is a singular achievement. Her poetic project, at once forward-dawning and ancestral, both revolutionary and decolonizing, is given total expression in this book. These poems moved me immensely; there is so much beauty, feeling, and power in all of them. No one is writing like jaye simpson."
--Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus and Coexistence
"a body more tolerable is a work at once open and lyric, fearless and tender. Expanding grief's territory into moments of relation and desire, simpson also challenges 'home, as a wayward theory' into a poetics of self-mothering, of being beyond becoming. This collection is a fierce and resistant nurturing."
--Liz Howard, author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
"jaye simpson is one of the most compelling and incisive voices of their generation. In a body more tolerable, they seize the English language and command it into an instrument that meticulously sings the realities of their present moment. I found solace, fire, and a relentless love for living and loving in these poetic offerings. a body more tolerable is a wayward map, and it is gorgeous. I'll carry it close to my heart."
--Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies
"'i can't retire this tongue, ' jaye simpson writes in a sophomore collection that creeps, howls, floats, shatters. an Indigenous speaker grapples with survival, the foster care system, the body, conceptions of motherhood, and trans girlhood in this heart-wrenching leap that returns what is most precious to us through lush language and keen lyricism. each poem is a portal of longing, ferocity, softness. i can't recommend it enough."
--Kinsale Drake, National Poetry Series-winning author of The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket
"Here, memorial flowers drip from parting lips, a swarm of bees escapes the throat, croaking a new magic in the face of old fears. Here, 'in the years of held breath, ' jaye simpson generously transports us through a body more tolerable, revealing with every page a blessed haunting, a knowing witness, an incendiary inheritance, and a different kind of return. Here, we are invited to discover sacred truths, yes, 'a scream can be a song... a sideways water... a cocoon of never happening... my heart, my heart, my heart, my heart, my heart...'"
--Jillian Christmas, author of The Gospel of Breaking
