Two Poems from boots by Nadia Rhook

Nadia Rhook is a white settler historian, educator and poet. Her poetry is inspired by her work as a historian as much as it is by her life experiences and family histories.

 

Click on the sound files below to hear Nadia Rhook read two poems from her debut collection  boots ( UWAP, 2020).

Like “a compulsory streak of lightning in an optional summer sky”, Nadia Rhook’s poems speak to the regrets of memory and the terrors of complicity – Rashida Murphy

 

granddad’s anger

 

The poems in Nadia Rhook’s boots grapple head-on with what it means to write as a settler in a colony – with that painful history, and ongoing reality of violence, theft and denial. – Melinda Smith

 

for the Chief Chinese Interpreter (Charles Hodges, 1831-1905)