Brandi Bird [photo credit: Geoffrey Wallang] is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Musqueam peoples (Surrey, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s awards. Brandi Bird is currently completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Their latest book is Pitiful (Anansi, 2026).
You mention in your “Acknowledgements” that Pitiful’s “skeleton” was written in only two months. What was it about those two months that allowed the collection to take form? How does Pitiful fit in with the rest of your work and what is new and/or exciting about it for you?
I wrote the first draft of the long
poem “Post-Memory” in one very sleepless night in the spring of 2024. I didn’t
have the intention of starting a new book of poetry and was more interested in
writing fiction and personal essay, two genres I’m trying to get a better grasp
of. The freedom I felt when I removed the identifier of “poet” from my egoic
makeup and just started “doing shit” made it possible for me to follow my
obsessions to their end.
I’ve
been recovered (which for myself means abstinent from all behavioural aspects
of bulimia) since 2018, and I’ve been trying to write about appetite, desire,
and control for my entire life (unsuccessfully). It wasn’t until I spat out
“Post-Memory” that I understood I was finally prepared to face the ugliness and
shame at the heart of most of the choices I’ve made in my life to simply
survive our world.
Pitiful
marks a new direction for me in my poetic
practice because I wrote it without the resentment I felt editing my first
book. When I started writing as an adult in 2016, I was confused about who I
was writing for and how to make myself legible to that imaginary audience. I
ended up hating my audience until I recognized the “audience” was actually an
effigy I’d crudely sewn together of myself. When I revisit The All + Flesh, I feel the undercurrent of smouldering resentment and
genuine care and love that I put into it. Pitiful was an effort to celebrate
the rage and disgust I’ve worked my entire life to bury. I dug out its rotten,
diseased corpse and decided to bring it into your bedsheets proud as a cat with
a dead rat.
To borrow again from your “Acknowledgements,” you mention that the poems began “unconcerned with anyone’s approval or understanding” but your own; yet you also mention its position amongst pop culture, history, and other writers. How does the collection balance these two boundaries, or rather, does it dwell in the overlap? Where does the reader stand now, for you, in response to a collection published in this vein?
I don’t think there are boundaries
between myself and the images, texts, and historical contexts I’ve studied or
experienced at all. I’ve cultivated my eye and taste and methods for analysis
through a lifetime of obsession and curiosity. I change my mind all the time
through a constant practice of integration and reintegration. All knowledge
overlaps. My audience is anyone who will listen or read a pull quote while
bored scrolling through their Instagram feed. I finally don’t feel the crushing
responsibility to create a knowable or legible persona.
I
am not an Indigenous poet. I am a poet who is Indigenous and comes from that
historical legacy, but I’m also a weird, perverted bitch, and I’ve studied
whiteness for my entire life. Every native person has too. I’m someone who is a
clone of a clone of a clone of every cool, edgy and/or serious writer I’ve
admired. I didn’t even know Indigenous people could be poets until I met Katherena
Vermette at an Indigenous Writer’s Circle group when I was 17. It just hadn’t
ever occurred to me.
When
I read Liz Howard’s and Jordan Abel’s work in 2016, I copied their voices until
I developed my own monstrous intensity and ethos. I grew up a citizen of the
early internet, posting on LiveJournal and then Tumblr. I learned about sex by
exploring gay erotic fanfiction at way too young an age and posted underage “thinspo”
to LJ communities created to inspire weight loss. I was an active poster on
forums for girls who ostensibly weren’t pro-anorexia/bulimia, but we still
inevitably triggered each other.
Pop
Culture has the power to reinforce and revise history, and Blade Runner or
Succession or Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer
made me the writer I am, regardless of their artistic quality. Roman Roy is
just as important to me as Sylvia Plath because disgust and fascination drive
my work more than any other emotional states.
To further expand on the concept of intertextuality, several of your poems reference depictions of eating disorders within television. What does it mean for your work to exist within and be shaped by a web of pop culture references? These poems “Notes on…” often include a dedication; what will prompt you to dedicate one poem over another? What does it mean for you to write for/about/within your communities and then share in this way?
The “Notes on…” poems are less about
textual depictions of eating disorders on television and more about the
fantastical construction of appetite, power, and sexuality that I’ve built
within those men. They’re poems about masculinity written explicitly to
counteract the “girl-ification” of suffering in literature/media about eating
disorders. I mean, I don’t think I’ve been treated like a girl anywhere in this
world since I grew tits and started smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of
thirteen (unless girlhood includes getting detained at fifteen for solicitation
and on suspicions that I was dealing crack from my bike in downtown Winnipeg).
The
“Notes on…” poems are cheeky things, little humiliation rituals for myself, as
much as they are for other fans of these fictional men too, these terribly sad
“babygirls,” these first crushes and sad loverboys whom women and girls and
women-who-were-never-actually-women-at-all project themselves onto.
The
poems are coated in disgust and fascination and desire and envy and ugliness.
They get to the core of what I’m trying to say in Pitiful while also
being fun as hell to read to a group of people. I simply dedicated each poem to
a friend who shares a love for the respective fandoms I’m gesturing towards.
They know why!
Heidi Elder (she/her) is a writer and editor from Ottawa, Ontario. She has edited for Understorey Magazine, Common House Magazine, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She currently works for CANREADS and is on the board of VERSe Ottawa. Her work has appeared in VISTAS (Vol. 41), Polar Expressions (Seaside, 2024), Echolocation (Vol. 23), Generation (forthcoming), and more.
