In concise poetry entrenched in nature and his Métis ancestry, entwined in political interrogations of identity, injustice, racism, and colonialism, R.P. LaRose provocatively makes the sonnet form his own. This identity faces the ambiguities of family memory along with the societal perceptions of Indigenous authenticity: where does everyone fit, how are they connected, and who’s to judge? Wolf Sonnets answers through a web of stories past and present, ripped from news headlines or, more often, loosened from murky national and personal history.

 

(…) My great-great-grandfather

Pleaded with a government:

“Dad always told me I’m Métis”

I plead: “My dad always told me.”

We’re never real enough for real.

We’re never fake enough for fake.

 

Storms rage across the prairies and within the psyche, wolf families howl together, and father figures cry, yet places and moments of calm also pervade Wolf Sonnets – there are so many ways to reflect and contemplate, whether in love with or anger at the world. 

 

Tell me how you feel about mean

breaths in the blood of powered men.

Autumn snow’s relentless.

Land herself is taken aback.

 

It’s a feat that LaRose encapsulates all this with steadily creative rhyme and rhythm, sonnet after sonnet, risking repetition but never falling into it, every numbered sonnet as distinct and essential as the subjects that populate it.mRb