Mallory Amirault's debut collection?Brine?is an ambitious land-metaphor; merging history and imagination, it's a work of poetry that doubles as a prose novel, an effort of interruption to long-standing Maritime coloniality. While excavating experiences of grief, violence, and shame?and unleashing those of love, joy, and belonging?the book's tide-like narrative and character-led intimacies do not avert from a violent and pervasive colonial thread.

At once personal, historical, and lyric, it represents for the author a life and an ethic toward creating long-term connections with Mi?kmaq communities in their home territory. Amireault describes?Brine?as an aboiteau at the shoreline of a colonial event. Engaging the elemental and political act of arriving and departing, the story is a mechanism that slowly removes salt from the Maritimes, and points to say wound.