Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-997508038
$21.95 CDN / $19.95 US | Trade Paperback
September 2025
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.
Praise for A Bow Forged from Ash
A Bow Forged from Ash is an expression of conceptual and tangible inheritances, cultural reclamation of memories, and full of generous personal insights from a true Indigenous poet who has traversed her way through the gauntlet of western education while strategically pocketing ingredients needed to write her truth. With an honest voice, Melissa Powless Day does not allow the reader to step away from her word journey, revealing Indigenous difficulties both collective and personal served as spiritual balm.—January Rogers -Poet, Playwright, Media Producer, Ojistoh Publishing and Productions
Powerful and moving, each poem in A Bow Forged from Ash is a seed planted to counter colonial violence and destruction. With a “breath of sovereignty,” Melissa Powless Day exhales a forest of stories and memories, writing the Land back to its origins: cedar, milkweed, river, walleye, field berries, sunlight. A Bow Forged from Ash is an extended howl against erasure and forgetting.—Amanda Merpaw, Author of Most of All the Wanting
