Skin by Tyler Pennock

Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. When a Two-Spirit Indigenous person returns home, they begin to understand the world through their relationships to others. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak.

Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what―and who―is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. For readers of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jeanette Armstrong, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin―porous, protective, remembering―for those still finding their way home.

Praise for Skin

“What if home is a cemetery erased by floods, where so many layers of erasure have taken place that it is nearly impossible to speak of oneself or of one’s community? Tyler Pennock invents a language in which to do so, one made of rapid, defamiliarized English and a newly re-acquired Cree, a language of blueberries in the freezer, crushed cigarette butts in a coffee cup, kittens appearing unexpectedly beneath a trailer porch. This is a book of looking through skin, of returning on a radically shifted topography, of love and of rage all residing together to reconstruct a livable home beneath which the dead still remember the coming generations.”―Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century

“The poetry in Tyler Pennock’s Skin unfurls through such delicate observances, ‘imagine an opening / an outward push / an expansion down a route / a spread in the trees.’ Layered with a gentle melody, Pennock writes each line with an attentive breath, thoughtfully attuned to the quietness of being. Skin is a collection that understands how ‘every utterance / is a drop pulled / from a puddle / evaporating,’ reminding us to pay attention to what is nearly gone, and what has always quietly existed.”―David Ly, author of Mythical Man and Dream of Me as Water