For the Changing Moon: Poems and Songs

At a time of cultural change for Indigenous people that feels relentlessly tidal and epochal, For the Changing Moon: Poems and Songs records the ebb and flow of what it is to live here and now in Canada, as a woman, an indigenous woman, a culturally mixed woman, a daughter, a mother, a peace-seeker and a warrior.

The book includes work visually designed for the page, and work composed to be chanted, sung, and spoken amongst ourselves. We are asked to experience it as a record of the shifting times, and understand how the mood of the world can strike change in an individual, sometimes, like a rogue wave; and other times, slowly and methodically like a lunar tidal pull.

If you can do this Can you, Can you do this? If we can do this, Can we? Can we do this?

Anna Marie Sewell’s poems court performance as they incorporate the energy of slam and employ the beat structures of chant. They encourage us to enter their spells and incantations always built with an ear for sound and with an eye for images of dream and wonder. Her invite and challenge is clear: Come lovers of language, seekers of change, moon-mad prophets, come. Read and share these poems and songs, and answer them back with your own.

From this specific place, Canada, during a moment of global sea change, these poems and songs reach for the moon-mad natural soul in all of us, that part of all of us that lives to follow the Great Song.