Trailer Park Shakes

2023 Indigenous Voices Awards Shortlist

The poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community — a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from.

These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice — how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything — an entire cross-section of lived experience — written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words' embrace. Dion-Glowa's poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.

"Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight." — Sachiko Murakami, author of Render

"A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed." — John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam