Leaf Counter (Downloadable PDF)
Flow into a new season in one of Canada’s most celebrated literary landscapes, with Leaf Counter. A lyric decolonial romp through the Ontario’s famed Prince Edward County, Aginjibagwesi (Spinus tristis) draws us through the poetics of the land and the struggles of the poet as decolonizer in this new epic border-crossing collection. Golden witness to the timelessness of land and spirits, Leaf Counter criss-crossed the lands around Ameliasburgh, its ghosts, heroes, and even the poets of Purdy’s A-Frame. Leaf Counter knows of sorrow, struggle, and wends a tale in a braided narrative as he scans "light and steeple” and sees timeless men at the centre and edges of the order of things, Simon Girty, Al Purdy, Charles Bukowski, and even Bret Hart, move and shift in time and place. Leaf Counter is our celestial, Lenape, winged guide of legend and myth. And through his spring enumeration of all things, we garner an understanding of the famed Canadian poet Al Purdy and the lands that he grew from. Witness the collapse of the old repressive order through the eyes of the poet and movements of the mighty little bird.
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Additional information
| Page Count | 150 |
|---|---|
| Year Published | 2025 |
D.A. Lockhart
D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction. His work has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, Raymond Souster Award, Indiana Author’s Awards, First Nations Communities READ Award, and has been a finalist for the ReLit Award. His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and Belt. Lockhart is a graduate of the Indiana University – Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing where he held a Neal-Marshall Fellowship in Fiction. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation (Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiit). His work frequently draws on linguistic and cultural decolonization with a specific mind towards building new Indigenous mythologies and poetics from the crossroads of cultures that contemporary citizens of Turtle Island’s First Nations find themselves in. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong. The latest on his work can be followed at wazhashkpoetry.com
Into the Watershed
This true country, it is said,
begins north of here,
in the waters around us.
And the spirit
of all creation
we touch
flows here.
Carried
by waters
cleaving drumlines
and marshes
and rock-laden
pastures,
as it courses
through to the bay
and inland waters
beyond.
Where I cannot run
amongst the pine heavy air
I cut into the land
along poured highways,
astride our loyalist war pony,
the search is for a quickening
a settling of spirit
into words
into act.