Boundary Territory finds its locus in British Columbia’s sparsely populated interior valleys—on greyhound buses, in motel rooms paid for by social services, and in the unsettled body of its speaker. This collection of poems offers a dual perspective, exploring geographic location from the vantage point of a transient teenager navigating small towns and the immediacy of trauma, as well as that of an adult interrogating the language of academia and examining landscape through the lens of ecocritical theory, situating themselves within geographic and emotional landscapes and a family lineage of failed settlements. With precision and care, the poems of Boundary Territory offer meditations on homelessness, trauma and resilience as they find their footing in the sensory details of geographic space.
Renée Harper (she/they) is a writer, artist and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Selkirk College, located on Sinixt territory in Nelson, BC. Harper studied painting and creative writing at the Kootenay School of the Arts and holds a PhD in Canadian Literature from York University. Her academic research focuses on the ongoing settler-colonial making and unmaking of place on Syilx territory in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. Through her academic and creative work, Renée aims to deepen her understanding of the complex histories and cultures of the regions she calls home.
