Skin (Paperback)

Conceived in the same world as Pennock’s first two books of poetry, Bones and Blood, Skin is the final book in a trilogy that centres a two-spirit Indigenous person's experiences.

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.

Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones (Brick Books), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto.