Kateri Akiwenzie-DammCritiques

This was a surprise!

Sometimes cheeky, sometimes filthy, sometimes sweet and sentimental, this collection was light-hearted and readable. This collection features authors from Canada (Turtle Island), Aboriginal Indigenous authors from Australia, Maori authors from New Zealand, Samoa and more.

I really enjoyed that each author had the opportunity to contribute multiple pieces of short fiction -- it felt like I got more of a taste for their writing style than from just one single piece. Some of these pieces had a great sense of humour, some of them were based in lore, some of them were sexy, some of them were intimate, and each were only a page or two in length.

I loved this collection most of all because I was able to find some authors whose writing style I really gravitated towards. I loved Tiffany Midge's poems, Marilyn Dumont's poetry, Gloria Bird, Velvet Black, Joy Harjo, Daniel David Moses... the list goes on.

I loved diving into the stories without knowing anything about them and just reading them as they were on the page. I'd squeal in delight if it turned out to be a queer story and smirk when some young, plucky 20-something year-old man got his just desserts.

This was a super easy collection to read before bed and I'm really happy I found lots of authors to read from.

The lives and loves of Anishinaabe people. Don't miss the heartbreaking story of Chloe, a reality for the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

My three star rating merely reflects my reading experience, not how well this book does what it aims to do – that certainly deserves a five. It's a great mixture of poetry and prose, and my only problem with it is the very personal one that I'd just don't get most modern poetry. So a lot of this left me looking kind of blank at the page; but even there, there were lines that struck me and resonated. And when it came to the prose, there were some wonderful stories: some bittersweet, some sheer joy.

The authors are from North America, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. The great majority of the pieces relate to heterosexual relationships, but there are a few lesbian, I think I recall one gay, and a couple about fa'afafine.

An anthology is such a mixed bag of writing. I remember that during my undergraduate degree, I would always choose anthologies to try out new authors -- and at that time, the height of identity politics, many of the anthologies I chose had to do with more marginalized authors: people of colour, LGBT writers. A few years later anthologies actually depressed me, because I felt there was too many writers that were just filling pages, rather than being very strong work. Collections often felt like they were just scanning the surface, and to me this accentuated the publishing world's marginalization of some of these writers; that it was probably easier to sell a collection by disabled women, for example, than just publishing a book by one of the authors even if it was stronger. It somehow felt like an "easy" method of addressing my concern about having read predominantly white writers at that time.

So Skins has its limitations for me as a reader.The strongest works here were those that didn't just confirm for me my own knowledge about indigenous peoples (such as stories that seem only to affirm their humanity, which often read overly simplified). So Alootook Ipellie's telling of a love triangle and the violence that follows in a surprise ending was great. I was terrified reading Joseph Bruchac's story of how the bones of a malevolent dead relative murders two parents, and how the children found the way to bring their parents back. I found it hard to get into the Sherman Alexie multi-voiced narrrative, but found the structure interesting. I love the writing of Louise Erdrich and Thomas King for their warmth; several other writers struck me as evoking a similar response, with their stories easy to fall into and absorbing for me. These included Linda Hogan, Briar Grace-Smith, Zion A. Komene, and Patricia Grace. Melissa Lucashenko's story of lust was just edgy enough without being precious, which I think is hard to pull off.

One of the sexiest books I've ever read, and seriously well written. It covers every love and desire on the spectrum.