ABSTRACT
The imbrication of roads and violence emerges also in “Leaks,” a poem that uses imagery of roads and settler infrastructure to register the sense of betrayal, impasse, and resistance evoked by Leanne Simpson young daughter’s first encounter with racism. As central topoi in “Leaks” and “Road Salt,” roads act as both physical setting and rhetorical conceit—as material places as well as metaphorical reservoirs of personal and collective grief. Flash mobs, round dances, rail blockades, and protests against pipeline projects were among Idle No More’s tactical uses of high-traffic spaces. Simpson’s “Road Salt” is disarmingly confessionals in its representation of the violence of the highway. In Simpson’s handling, the roadside exists as an abject space that is also a critical window into oil’s immersive infrastructure even while being in dangerous proximity to it. The representation of violence in “Road Salt” shuttles back and forth between the bodily and the ecological.
