A post-apocalyptic Native poetry collection that creates possibility for repair and reconciliation by holding the simultaneity of a violent past and a hopeful future.
 
Aja Couchois Duncan’s third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, explores cycles of violence, loss, and love that arc across history. Composed of intersecting narratives, this collection follows a post-apocalyptic collective of survivors living in a state of gratitude, shame, and awe amid desecrated ecosystems. The present tense of The Intimacy Trials carries the magnitude of a historic past tense filled with land theft, genocide, settler colonialism, and the vicissitudes of romantic love. Couchois Duncan’s lyrical, concomitant stories produce a space that holds in balance the complexities of life—joy, despair, intimacy, and irreconcilable grief.
 
In language that is prophetic, lush, and unequivocal, The Intimacy Trials is a loving accountability letter to our past, present, and future selves, holding both our yearning for connection and the remembrance of what has driven us apart.
 

Aja Couchois Duncan is a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coast Miwok people. She is the author of Vestigial and Restless Continent, which won the California Book Award for Poetry. Her other projects include the collaborative opera Sweet Land, which was named the best opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America.
 

treble
witness
bass
quaver
ritual
pitch
fissure
Miigwech