Aja Couchois Duncan, The Intimacy Trials

 

The first word is gesture, is origin, is Gichi-manidoo’s breath. But the beginning is also the end. There are, in every membrane, the cellular markers of death.

We who were once muskrat and owl, moose and caribou. We who are spirit and matter, anima and animus. We who have survived disaster only to find its transcription in our DNA.

Antecedents thread each layer of dermis. We are, each one of us, wrapped in their skin.

When anxious, we peel our fingers until they bleed. We lean over and gnaw the skin of another’s neck. Drumming the flood inside of us. Not beaver but raptor, all beak and wing.

The cycles of time form concentric loops. Reach out and touch the blur of particles, past and future mere inches apart.

Yesterday we walked the pocked surface of the moon. Tomorrow we will be scalded by the fires of Mars.

The earth has been stripped of all her secrets. Each morning Aki wakes, dawn, prying her legs apart. (“(treble)”)

Described in her bio as “a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coach Miwok people,” poet Aja Couchois Duncan is the author of the newly-released The Intimacy Trials (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2026), a poetry title that follows her collections Vestigial (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] in their articulations around what poet and critic Douglas Kearney, on the back cover of this current collection, describes as “a dynamic ecopoetics keen on Indigenous futures beyond survivance.” Set in seven sections of extended lyric fragments—“treble,” “witness,” “bass,” “quaver,” “ritual,” “pitch” and “fissure”—The Intimacy Trials begins at the beginning and expands ever outward. “The first word is gesture, is origin,” as the opening piece offers, “is Gichi-manidoo’s breath.” From there, Duncan expands and threads a storytelling lyric, weaving the past into the present, documenting history and trauma and resilience into the possitibilities of both the present, and a possible future. “We are as real as the perpetual present tense.” she writes, early in the book’s third section, “Our dreams sensorial. Cloaked in darkness, we rummage our bodies until something settles into place. An elbow or breast. The declension of a belly unfed.” Duncan is very good at blending dream and witness, a firm hand and a tale enough to hold everything it requires to seek truth.

As much as this is an assemblage of poems, of lyric sequenses, The Intimacy Trials can be seen as a long poem, or book-length lyric suite, that takes the scope and the scale, the measure, of her own perspective on contemporary Indigeneity, a present that holds far too many ripples across centuries of colonial violence. “It is the business / of treaties. Taking more than,” she writes, amid “witness,” “an agree- / ment be- / tween men.” She writes of witness and resistance; determined, with a particular timeless air. These concerns aren’t purely contemporary, after all, but hold the accumulated weight of the decades since European arrival across North America. As she writes to close the first section: “We are a precarious diaspora. There is nowhere left to go.”