The Crooked Good

Book excerpt: Through the voice of ê-kwêskît – Turn-around Woman – Louise Halfe guides the reader on a three-fold journey down a path where the personal, the historical and the mythic walk hand-in-hand. Louise Halfe revisits familiar Indigenous themes, but pushes them farther than she has before, in this third collection of her moving, powerful poetry. The ancestors speak through a Mother’s fireside stories, and the figure of Rolling Head recurs everywhere on the path – as nightmare, as conscience, as maternal lover. The heartbreaking dysfunction of an Indigenous family, and the haunted memories and temptations of one woman’s quest, are tempered by the tenderness, the loyalty, and the outbursts of earthy laughter that distinguish Louise Halfe’s unique gifts as a poet and as mediator between two cultures.