SCATTERED OBLATIONS

From the winner of the 2023 Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award and Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry comes a scintillating, incisive collection of poems—reckoning with the ambivalence of transformation amidst the displacement and resurgence of Métis life on stolen land.

Livid and pensive, jagged and porous, these poems resist containment, traversing deposits of grief and anti-Indigenous racism. Skjeies poems refuse linearity, instead melding the ecological with the celestial, and the personal with the communal. The tension between what was stolen, what remains, and what is possible pulls taut across the collection, coalescing into a voice that dismantles itself even as it revives.

In Scattered Oblations, Skjeie writes from the psychic fracture of colonial inheritance, wielding language like a scalpel. The collection vaults from Métis cartographies to cosmic reckoning, from the ghost of Riel to the brutal mechanics of bureaucratic indifference. Whether in “Unusual Métis,” where identity itself becomes a site of confrontation, or in the aching self-interrogation of “my name as insult,” Skjeie refuses absolution. These poems cut history down to its rawest elements: language as survival, poetry as reclamation.