"Joshua Whitehead's Making Love with the Land is defiantly artful. The essays are alert to so much of the beauty and the terror of the world. I imagine they cost a great deal to write. While reading, I was entirely overcome with gratitude. How lucky we all are to witness Whitehead's kinetic thinking as well as to be in pain with him. A truly dazzling feat of heart, analysis, and sentence-making." —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World and A History of My Brief Body
"In his latest ‘wonderwork,’ Joshua Whitehead continues his signature and significant mission to undo colonial notions of genre, pushing the boundaries of memoir and cultural commentary into a wholly new, otherworldly terrain. Here, he makes love with body, kin, queerness, and music, demonstrating how making love isn’t just an act of pleasure, but also one of grief, pain, and sometimes even solitude. A voice to listen to, learn from, cherish." —Vivek Shraya, author of People Change and I’m Afraid of Men
"In this essay collection, Joshua Whitehead pushes at the possibilities of form, and the results are consistently a mix of the revelatory and the sublime. A chiaroscuro of self-questioning directed inward as a way to go outward—affectionate, resolute, playful, and wise. Brilliant lessons learned are on offer here, but more as an invitation to re-experience what you might not know you know." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays
"An elegiac and elegant book of revelations, confessions, and reverberations." —Kirkus Reviews
"Thrillingly cerebral. . . . Delivered with virtuoso aplomb." —The New York Times
"Whitehead weaves Indigenous Cree language throughout the essays to powerful effect, and though his metaphors can at times be winding, he asks moving questions without resorting to simple answers... Fans of the personal essay will relish Whitehead’s evocative, rich prose." —Publishers Weekly
"An absorbing and compelling work of nonfiction."—Inside Hook
"A funny, moving, original story about a 20-something Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer
person living and loving and working and remembering in the week
leading up to his stepdad’s funeral."—Laura Sackton, Book Riot
"Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live."—Erica Ezeifedi, Book Riot
"An excellent book for anyone interested in the art of language and communication, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand more about queer and/or NDN experiences."—The Frumious Consortium
"In Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love With the Land, every single sentence leaves a sense of awe as the author offers deeply personal and powerful observations with breathtaking prose. Whitehead writes in such an intimate, poetic and vulnerable way that his work is truly like nothing else. "—Fulton Sun
"Meditative and wholly cathartic, Making Love with the Land is a book to savor, its words best experienced the second time after letting them fully wash over you. "—Electric Literature
"Whitehead’s writing can be challenging in the best way, asking readers to reexamine ideas around literature and what it can do. There’s something special about the way Whitehead discusses storytelling, especially the way he examines how his personal experience informs his writing."—Kendra Winchester, Book Riot
"Beautifully written and deeply vulnerable, Whitehead reflects on his life experiences, opening up about his eating disorder, sexual assault, queerness, being Indigenous, and more. Full of striking, powerful quotes, this thought-provoking book is both heartbreaking and awe-inspiring."—Northern Wilds
"Whitehead compellingly examines relationships in a wholistic manner that captures Indigenous understandings of kinship, time, and place. His work is invaluable in examining Two-Spirit Indigenous perspectives on settler colonialism."—H-Net
2022-08-17
A collection of essays by a poet, novelist, and professor of international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary.
“Am I queer enough to be queer? Perhaps the answer is no. But also, perhaps the answer is yes.” So asks Whitehead, Oji-Cree/nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation. The author resists classification precisely because, borrowing a page from Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. “I identify as Two-Spirit,” he writes, “which means much more than simply my sexual preference within Western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme/iskwewayi, male/ nâpew, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities.” In other words, even as he rejects old, often outdated terms, Whitehead demands to be deemed whatever he deems himself to be—a recipe for loneliness as a teenager, he allows, one that, with weight issues mixed into the brew, yielded cause for alienation and angst. The opening essay highlights an extended metaphor about likening himself to the rough-and-tumble “rez dogs” that own the territory between wild and settled. A brave rez dog was able to chase down a bear, an event that Whitehead likens to a kind of possession, the spirit of the bear churning inside himself as he eats it, “his amino acids and my body-milk coming together and syllabic elements.” While some of the pieces are celebratory, honoring the homeland implied in his title, others are mournful. Some focus on the recognition that the world is on the edge of apocalypse and that its Indigenous peoples “have moved into a post-dystopian future.” Then there is the loss of loved ones to death or separation, the cancers and other diseases that carry away parents and relatives. Throughout, Whitehead is a lyric poet writing in prose, proudly declaring himself to be “transgressive [and] punk”—and, very clearly, a survivor.
An elegiac and elegant book of revelations, confessions, and reverberations.
