Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love with the Land is defiantly artful. The essays are alert to so much of the beauty and the terror of the world. I imagine they cost a great deal to write. While reading, I was entirely overcome with gratitude. How lucky we all are to witness Whitehead’s kinetic thinking as well to be in pain with him. A truly dazzling feat of heart, analysis, and sentence-making. – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World and A History of My Brief Body

Following the publication of his debut novel Jonny Appleseed, Joshua Whitehead has emerged as one of the most exciting and important new voices on Turtle Island. Now, in this first non-fiction work, Whitehead brilliantly explores Indigeneity, queerness, and the relationships between body, language and land through a variety of genres (essay, memoir, notes, confession). Making Love with the Land is a startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person “in the rupture” between identities. In sharp, surprising, unique pieces – a number of which have already won awards – Whitehead illuminates this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating new (and old) ideas about “the land.” He asks: What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies?

Here is an intellectually thrilling, emotionally captivating love song – a powerful revelation about the library of stories land and body hold together, waiting to be unearthed and summoned into word.

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Shelf Life Books | Calgary Public Library 

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• How Joshua Whitehead is bringing Indigenous languages into CanLit – Macleans
• Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead: A personal essay collection exploring Indigeneity, queerness and identity – CBC Books
• With Making Love with the Land, Joshua Whitehead is looking at the magician behind the curtain – The Toronto Star