Francine Cunningham’s debut collection of poetry on/me is a beautiful balancing act of heartbreak and joy, survival and pain, humour and grief, belonging and loss. Deceptively small, the poems hum with power on the page. Each one opens a small window into the poet’s world, inviting the reader to come along for a difficult journey. Cunningham writes keenly of mental illness, abuse, death and racism—pairing each poem with moments of laughter, razor sharp wit, and unyielding resilience. on/me sings of the complexities of living, of inhabiting a multitude of identities that are chosen, inherited and forced. Cunningham’s remarkable gift for constructing beautifully crafted lines and breathing light into every word gives the reader an unforgettable collection.  

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The poems featured in this collection range from anywhere between two lines to two pages.  Despite being small, on/me takes some time to chew and digest. Cunningham has an intuitive knack for making a single image almost endlessly expansive. Even if a reader has processed the words on the page, the world the poet has constructed linger vividly in the reader’s mind. In “On Family/Mother” the speaker describes how her mother “locked herself in her room/for almost a year when [the speaker’s father] finally left,” how the speaker and her sisters sat in the living room “listening to the sound of her rocking chair/thump against the floor” and had to quickly learn how to care for themselves. These micro details paint such a weighted image of sorrow, betrayal, helplessness and determination, but in conjunction with Cunningham’s sparse punctuation and quick line breaks, the poem never feels bloated or unwieldy.

Cunningham admits to not being a writer of long poems, preferring to play in the empty spaces that micro-poems allow. 

“All that space is not really empty but is instead filled with so much unsaid but imagined. I love leaving space and time for a reader to fill in a poem with their own stories and memories,” says Cunningham. 

This rings true for a majority of the collection’s poems in this collection— a fine balance of what is depicted and what is left unsaid, the universal and the deeply personal, the in-between, the undefined.

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on/me is structured as an encyclopedia of the poet, each entry framed around a handful of different categories.

 “Family and identity were where this collection started,” says Cunningham, likening the topic to “the spine of the book and… the other sections, the connective tissue, the veins, the skin.” 

 This parallel with a living organism is apt, as there is something profoundly alive about this book, the way each poem pulses with a life force and they all work together to create a thriving, complex whole.

Cunningham, in putting this collection together, has also taken into consideration the order that these poems fall into, a deliberate organization that informs the reading experience. What makes on/me unique is its ability to be read in a multitude of different ways. Structure and delivery is a preoccupation of Cunningham’s, which she attributes to her background as a fiction writer. 

“I wanted a book you could re-read and get something different and get something out of it depending on how [the reader] approached it,” Cunningham explains.

 Save for the physical form of the book, there is no defined linear inclination, and the reader can approach these poems as groups or separate entities and still find an emotional arc no matter the pattern. on/me invites this playful engagement, even encourages it. Every component of the collection, from the words to the empty spaces, are thoughtfully considered functioning mechanisms. There is no one way to be, no singular way to exist. How people receive us is often beyond our control. on/me understands this. Revels in it. Draws on it as a source of power. 

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Indigenous youth was a key source of inspiration for Cunningham while writing this collection. Over fifteen years of experience facilitating workshops and group conversations, in combination with her own experience, makes this book not only a reflection of herself, but a lighthouse to other Indigenous youth working through their own heartbreak and struggle. 

“I just really want youth to know that they’re not alone, and I hope by me being so open and honest it helps them know they’re not alone,” says Cunningham.

 on/me tells the story of sorrow and survival in all its messiness. Cunningham doesn’t attempt to provide answers for all of these traumas, but offers her stories, her love, and her honesty. 

Cunningham says she grew up surrounded by both love and fear, and her collection expertly weaves between these polar extremes.

“No story of mine can exist without that undercurrent of ‘maybe it’s not going to be okay’ in a big way,” she says.“So for this collection, when putting it together, it was really important for me to have that emotionality running through it. I needed that knife edge.” 

Marginalized identity is often deeply tangled with the trauma of the past, lived and ancestral. on/me cuts deep, but at its core there is a profound sense of forward momentum, a balancing act of the past and the present, stepping into the future. 

Cunningham is now working on an animated poem project for kids in both Cree and English, which she is also providing artwork for. There is also a forthcoming short story collection of speculative horror stories, and a memoir weaving together personal essays and poetry even further down the line.

 “I wrote [the short story collection] knowing that I was going away from the stereotypical stories that people expect when they hear Indigenous writers,” says Cunningham. “My goal is to have my books be not confined to that one shelf in bookstores, but to actually be out with all the other books.”

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