Settler Education

"A tone-perfect elegiac meditation on the impossibility of engaging with painful history and the necessity of doing so." – Margaret Atwood, Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Poetry

In the stunning poems of Settler Education, Laurie D. Graham vividly explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.

Praise for Laurie D. Graham:

"Graham grabs you by the hand tugging you into a running pace across prairie time and space in a frenzied barrage of culture, history, memory and detritus." —Telegraph-Journal

"In a manner reminiscent of Jan Zwicky and Robert Kroetsch . . . [Graham’s poetry] combines meditation with compact sensory impressions. . . . [Innovative], lyrical, wise, and moving, [her work] considers and details the surface changes of a region in Western Canada, evoking a strong sense of place." —Gerald Lampert Award jury citationLAURIE D. GRAHAM’s first book of poetry, Rove, was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Poems from her second collection, Settler Education, were shortlisted for the 2014 CBC Poetry Prize and won The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Poetry. Graham holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and an MFA from the University of Guelph. She is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal, as well as an instructor at Fanshawe College. She grew up in Sherwood Park, Alberta, and now lives in London, Ontario.