Northerny

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.
Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North.
Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North.
"In Northerny, Dawn Macdonald tempers a poetic soulfulness with a comic's sense for absurdity and punch. These poems speak with smart humor and wit, linguistic delight, and honest observations spiked with confession, always with an ear, too, for what their poet can't say. Macdonald's take on born-and-raised life in the north avoids romantic quagmires with a well-cured settler colonial self-consciousness. Macdonald resists worn expectations in this fresh expansion of northern literature rich with voice, earned insight, and meaning." Jeremy Pataky, author of Overwinter "Dawn Macdonald's poetry is alive with curiosity and truth. She speaks in conversation at times soft and at times bitter, creating images from a reality that can be obscure yet familiar. Macdonald's singular work reveals the unromantic beauty of a storied northern world full of lichen, kingfishers, and dog hair. Her poems open new paths in poetry from the high latitudes. This work is a bright addition to any library." Ernestine Hayes, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017-2018
"Northerny echolocates around the rural, urban, and more-than-human worlds with unflinching curiousity. Macdonald's poetry bewilders language, making it romp, flit, and twist. Her images are in turn luminous and jarring cut with knife-sharp wit, unafraid to trespass against our expectations." Clea Roberts, author of Auguries "...the poems here refuse the easy depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop." rob mclennan's blog, May 25, 2024 [full article https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024/05/dawn-macdonald-northerny.html] # 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 5, 2024 # 5 on Edmonton Poetry Bestseller list, May 12, 2024
"...Macdonald describes a North which is anything but stereotypical, or stereotypically romantic.... Conversational, tangential, at times funny, at times baffling, these poems can also dazzle with their imagery.... There's all kinds of clever wordplay here..." Kelly Shepherd, Alberta Views Magazine, December 1, 2024
"Dawn Macdonald's Northerny is a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands 'the personal is heretical,' and glories in that fact. It's a rush, a relief, and remakes with impishness the notion of what a poem can be." Judges' Citation: 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize



• 1.
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• Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest
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• 11 Conversations
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• 5 Ways of Shutting Up
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• Littlest
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• The 2nd Shortest Day
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• The Failure of Winter's Five-Year Plan
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• Quickness