Melissa Powless Day is Anishinaabe and Kanien’kehá:ka from Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation), with family ties in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Her poetry has appeared in the Temz Review, TNQ, the Windsor Review, Luna Station Quarterly and Yellow Medicine Review, and her first chapbook, Secondhand Moccasins, was published in 2023 by Anstruther Press and shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Melissa is also a scholar and educator who is currently pursuing a PhD in Indigenous Education at Western University. She serves as the chair for Western’s Indigenous Writers’ Circle and as a Visiting Cultural Teacher for the London District Catholic School Board. A Bow Forged from Ash is a journey of Indigenous reclamation. In poems that explore identity, belonging, responsibility and wholeness, Melissa Powless Day navigates her ties to the landscapes of Southwestern Ontario and the nations to which she belongs. Traversing lived experience, ancestral memory, family stories, and critical engagements with the Land, Powless Day pulls back the bow of language: her poems are poised, unyielding in their nanda-gikendang, their seeking, to voice complex stories about the messiness of returning home, a restoration of familial and community bonds generations in the making. Ultimately, A Bow Forged from Ash is a book that proves reclamation and resistance are inseparable: one cannot walk with pride in their Indigeneity without choosing to resist the colonial status quo.
