jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate, and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hopes of creating utopia. Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize and won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English.
“[jaye simpson’s] poetic project, at once forward-dawning and ancestral, both revolutionary and decolonizing, is given total expression in this book. These poems moved me immensely; there is so much beauty, feeling, and power in all of them.”–Billy-Ray Belcourt (Coexistence)
Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman.
As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:
i am five
my sisters are saying boy
i do not know what the word means but—
i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,
the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
Starring Amber Dawn, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ben Ladouceur & jaye simpson. Featuring Timothonious & Jane Madeleine. Hosted by Paula Turcotte
Presented by Wordfest and Pansy Club YYC. Starring Amber Dawn & jaye simpson.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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