How She Read
Chantal Gibson
How She Read by Canadian author, Chantal Gibson, is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape. Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness.
Chantal Gibson is a Canadian artist-educator interested in the cultural production of knowledge. Her work explores the overlap between literary and visual art and challenges imperialism quietly embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps. An award-winning instructor, she teaches in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
How She Read by Canadian author, Chantal Gibson, is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape. Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness.
Chantal Gibson is a Canadian artist-educator interested in the cultural production of knowledge. Her work explores the overlap between literary and visual art and challenges imperialism quietly embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps. An award-winning instructor, she teaches in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
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- Paperback, 104 pages, colour photos
- 6 x 9"
- Published 2015
- Shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize
- Winner of the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
