I’m the author of five poetry collections and a Lecturer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. I’ve held writing residencies in Brisbane, Tasmania, Granada, and Berlin and my work is published widely in Canada and internationally. I live in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territory.
Jacqueline Turner
jacqwturner@gmail.com
A compendium of memories, a selection of everyday marvels: Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography and poetry. The poems act like micro essays, miniature memoirs, precise manifestos or bright lyrics to show how a tense beauty flourishes in contemporary cities. The collection enacts a restorative cartography of nostalgia by revealing the intricacies of grief coupled with new ways to think about the past. It was meant to be simple, but things are always more complicated than they seem.
"Flourish is not a contradiction of form but an expansive collusion, a pact with time, the reader and art, well worth the detailed read, and reread." —Nathaniel G. Moore Arc Poetry Magazine Full Review
"Flourish is a quiet tornado: riveting, expansive, and profoundly moving on multiple levels." — Theresa Smalec Associate Professor, Bronx Community College/City University of New York
“Reading Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish makes us want to write, to remember; also to sing, then read, then cry, and re-read. What the book makes us want to do is re-think it all, and re-think remembering it all, and remember re-thinking it — and most of all — to keep reading this, to keep this reading. We know we’ll return to it again.” — Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour, Performance Bond, 49th Parallel Psalm, and After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region
“[Turner’s] prose poems do come through in a rush; one that appears highly considered, each word and phrase weighed before set on the page, but with such an ease of flow akin to a sudden release of water.” — Rob Mclennan’s blog and full review
Into the Foldcharts the body's landscape; it maps longing while exploring how the triple pull of the domestic, erotic, and geographic are enacted in a woman's life. Part narrative, part travel log, pure poetry, Turner's debut collection examines the poetics of the fold-the space between conflicting desires-and interrogates and reconstructs traces of memory from out of a shifting past. The compression of her language erupts with fleeting images of growing up in a trailer beside the railroad tracks, raising boys in minivans, and the way lips feel against the back of your neck. Startlingly honest, intense, and unnerving, Into the Fold drives and dislocates its readers, ultimately questioning everyone's place in the world.
Book, Poetry
Careful careens around a series of domestic distractions and interruptions, where language is compressed and ripped up images accumulate across the local terrain. Turner's much anticipated second book is witty, sensual, and intense: it documents the synthetic ache of now, releasing a life on the edge of things.
Book, Poetry
Seven Into Even reworks Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in counterpoint to the seven deadly sins, and brings these vast references through a mesh of contemporary settings and issues in a series of poetic installations. The number seven works as an organizing principle: the book struggles with narrative and its constraints, questioning the development of characters as a poetic device, and reflecting on itself as it builds.
Book, PoetryThis is a Text explores rural/urban/textual interfaces in a verdant North Vancouver forest; it is a collaborative project between myself and film maker Brian Johnson - produced by The Capilano Review. The film takes a liminal space as a departure point for considering the textuality of things. Is text the boundary between the constructed and natural worlds? Are there similar boundaries between the (social) media we engage with and the meanings we hope to convey?
May 2018
Residency held in the city that was home to Federico García Lorca with a variety of participants from the world of the arts and cultural-literary studies.
July 2018
A research-based residency, with a unique combination of participatory workshops, studio visits, guided walks, public lectures, open reading groups and a series of interventions.
2006
I gave poetry workshops, and worked on a manuscript during this month-long residency.
2005
Inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane July – October 2005. I performed readings, participated in panels, and conducted workshops all across Queensland.
jacqwturner@gmail.com
