Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill, translated by Kristen Renee Miller

You’re the clump of blackened spruce
that lights my gasoline-soaked heart

It’s just impossible you won’t be back
to quench yourself in my crème-soda
ancestral spirit

Irreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.

In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in Gill’s interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate her interior landscape—of heartbreak, humour, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.

Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill’s poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Québécoise woman.

Praise for Heating the Outdoors:

“These poems live in a bachelor apartment over the corner store. They’re on the bus looking out at the muddy hangtime between winter and spring, in a too-warm jacket. These poems will make you a cup of tar-coffee and tell you about the ache of desire in the language of crunching snow. You’ll come back to them over and over again to listen.” —Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings

“Marie-Andrée Gill’s spare, luminous micropoems are endlessly surprising, twisting out, into, and unto themselves like complicated lovers. Defiantly fragmentary, these are stunning shards of tongues, embodied vernaculars slowly, steadily unsettling grammars. Kristen Renee Miller’s translations retain the elegance and shimmer of the originals while wondrously conveying their knottedness, their syntax of skin. When at last we reach Nitassinan, we are reminded of the worlds poetry documents, but also of the worlds it creates. This is poetry that claims the power to ‘gnaw the meat off each day and spit out the pin bones’ through a language as unresolved as our decolonial dreams and as necessary as our sovereign desires.” —Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal

“Heating the Outdoors is a stunning collection exploring heartbreak, and the awkward dance between exes from the positionality of an Ilnu and Québécoise woman whose poetic ‘gasoline-soaked heart’ yearns deeply for love. Translated by Kristen Renee Miller from French into English, Gill’s Heating the Outdoors re-wilds the ritualistic humdrum of domestic life while honouring the land and her ‘crème-soda ancestral spirit.’” —Shannon Webb-Campbell, author of Lunar Tides and I Am a Body of Land

Press Coverage:

“An exceptional third book by the Saguenay poet, who kneels in the beautiful snowbanks of a love that melts all too quickly.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir

“A luminous, resilient read that finds resonance in our little hidden wounds.” —Rose Carine Henriquez, Le Devoir

“I’m literally captivated by the accuracy, the beauty. They taste of honey, these poems.” —Karine Villeneuve, bookseller, Page par Page

“This collection of poems is a powerful, refreshingly honest ode to womanhood, love, loss, and introspection. There is a level of vulnerability in each line and a level of honesty within each stanza that readers interested in coming-of-age literature should, without a shadow of a doubt, enjoy.” —Olivia Cyrus, The Cyrus Piece

Warm Up with a Glimpse into Marie-Andree Gill’s Heating the Outdoors, a Collection of Heart-Piercing Micropoems —Open Book

“Miller’s translation skillfully delivers the energy and pacing of Gill’s ruminative poems… These pages full of irreverent musings deliver affecting details and candor.” —Publishers Weekly

46 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in spring 2023 —CBC Books

Every Writer Should Learn How to Translate: Kristen Renee Miller on the Transformative Experience of Translating Marie-Andrée Gill —Lit Hub

Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2023 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

“Heating the Outdoors is a study in tone, beautifully captured in Kristen Renee Miller’s translations from the French.” —Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation

“This final, glowing image”: A Conversation with Kristen Renee Miller, curated by Naoko Fujimoto —Tupelo Quarterly

“Short visceral punches of poetry. That’s what I like, that’s what moves me. Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andree Gill does that in spades, opening the door to let the heat out in gusts. Exploring inner and outer landscapes and how the heart graphs on to the land, what we’re owed in relationships and by blood. An indigenous award-winning poet whose latest micropoems are entire shrunken worlds of emotion.” —Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird

“Heating the Outdoors is a stunning and significant compilation of poems. It is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary poetry and the complex relationship between language, land, and identity. Heating the Outdoors welcomes readers on an emotional and intellectual voyage, a poetic odyssey that enlightens the human condition and stirs the soul. This book, which honors Indigenous culture and vernacular while addressing themes of love, sorrow, and transformation on a universal level, had me completely enthralled. You won’t be able to put this captivating book down.” —Ayaat Ismail, Miracle Monocle

“Gill writes a sequence of meditative sketches on the wilds of domestic matters and domestic matter into clusters of lyric propulsion, moments captured in turned light, and the intimacy of each small moment, contained and collected, simultaneously holds an infinite space.” —rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog

The Future Shrugs: An excerpt from Heating the Outdoors —Poetry Daily

“Heating the Outdoors, an intimate lyric written by Marie-Andrée Gill and tenderly translated from the French by Kristen Renee Miller, is a “love story like all others.” As a result, the poems balance precariously between “simple happiness” and “storm damage.’”—Jami Macarty, New Pages

The Best Canadian Poery of 2023—CBC

Marie-Andrée Gill is a member of the Ilnu Nation and grew up on the Mashteuiatsh reserve in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region in Quebec, home to the Pekuakamishkueu community. She is the acclaimed author of three French-language poetry collections from La Peuplade: Béante, Frayer, and Chauffer le dehors. Two of her books have been translated into English by Kristen Renee Miller, including Spawn (2020) and Heating the Outdoors (2023). A doctoral student in literature, Gill’s research and creative work focus on the decolonial project of writing the intimate. She hosts the award-winning Radio-Canada podcast “Laissez-nous raconter: L’histoire crochie” (Telling Our Twisted Histories), which “reclaims Indigenous history by exploring words whose meanings have been twisted by centuries of colonization.” Gill’s work has been nominated for many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and she is a three-time recipient of the Salon du Livre Prize in Poetry. She has also won two Indigenous Voices Awards, including the Best Published Poetry in French prize for Chauffer le dehors. Also in 2020, Gill was named Artist of the Year by the Quebec Council of Arts and Letters.

Kristen Renee Miller is the executive director and editor-in-chief for Sarabande Books. A poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA Fellow and the translator of two books from the French by poet Marie-Andrée Gill: Spawn (2020) and Heating the Outdoors (2023). Her work can be found widely, including in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the American Literary Translators Association. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.