Awâsis: Kinky and Dishevelled
by Lousie B. Halfe Sky Dancer
Brick (2021)

Awâsis: Kinky and Dishevelled by Louise B. Halfe Sky Dancer is a trickster’s book of shape shifting gendered identity, culture, mood, perception, and even language itself. Opening with an introduction to otâcimow/ The Storyteller, we learn this is no ordinary world, but one of shifting realities. Gender is whatever, identity is whatever, and all that matters is how lightly you, the reader, take it.

… I’ve heard
the settler is confused
about your shape shifting.
You can’t decide
if you’re an animal or a human,
if you’re a he or a she. (1)

In the book’s acknowledgements, Halfe claims this a book of “funny little stories / wawiyatâcimowinsia.” Laugh out loud moments happen regularly that poke fun at farting on stage, accidentally using shampoo as sex cream, or the poem “Indian Botox.”

She thought preparation H
might tighten the creases.
With gobs of ointment, she smeared
her whole face, adding heavily on the tracks. . .
“So my face could be as tight
as your ass,” Awâsis informed him. (54)

And then there’s the mocking names of characters evocative of a Shakespearian insult kit: “Sun Who Sits Down, Wet Pants, Rubber, / Dirty Poke, Raw-Eating Child, Mud Hen, / Ugly Duckling, Chickadee, Cut-Off Tail . . .” (19). It is clear that Halfe knows a thing or two about mockery, especially self-mockery.
She takes the piss out of Whiteman, who constantly loses everything including himself.

Then Little Whiteman lost his wallet.
For weeks he dug in all his pockets,
his coats, drawers, bags, and made
phone calls to the drugstore, the café,
the gas station.
Finally, weeks later,
shovelling snow from the sidewalk,
he turned to find the wallet, waiting.

awâsis kept a close eye on him.
Someday Little Whiteman might
lose himself. (28)

The overarching tone is one of extreme inclusion, levity, and re-examination of perception. Brilliantly, Halfe tackles the genre of homophonic translation as a method of examining multi-lingualism as yet another shape shifting form. In several poems language itself slides around like eggs on Teflon. This experimental example is from the poem “Bored Meeting”:

awâsis was con-duck-thing a fist-full year-end
bored meeting.
She asked her ass-sis-tent
to place her diaphragm
on the scream so people could see
the numb-burrs.
She opened the window
so they wouldn’t get sophisticated. (65)

Moments like this are abundant. With a genuine and hearty, playful spirit, Halfe’s base humorous has the timelessness of puns aimed at the Globe’s groundlings. Her poetry slipstreams in the realm of magical realism and is meant to include everyone who is capable of laughing at the ridiculous, indefinable nature of being alive. awâsis, she states, “translates to ‘being lent a spiritual being’” and indeed the reader has a spectacular guide. Lastly, Halfe claims, “I, too, want that bit of happy madness” (3). awâsis is a book of happy madness and a giant breath of fresh air.

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Calgary, was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016), and teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University. She is the Consulting Editor of FreeFall Magazine. Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021).

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