Writer & Educator
Jacqueline Turner
Author of five poetry collections & Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design
I live in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territory.
Relational Gratitude
Contact
jacqwturner@gmail.com
I’m the author of five poetry collections and an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. My research investigates the role of generous curiosity and relational gratitude in creating conditions for collaboration and I’m part of a multi-institutional research project on “Caring Futures in Canadian Art + Design Education.”
My fifth book Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography, and poetry. Both personal and experimental, the writing becomes transformative as it explores my memories of growing up in a small town, parenting a set of adventurous sons, travelling, and reading. At times these poems act like micro essays, at other times they are miniature memoirs or precise manifestos, and throughout the collection’s exploration of contemporary cities and culture, a tense beauty often emerges. My other books include:The Ends of the Earth, Seven into Even, Careful, and Into the Fold all with ECW Press.
I’ve held writing residencies in Brisbane, Tasmania, Granada, and Berlin and my work is published widely in Canada and internationally. Over the years she was a founding member of filling Station magazine, on the collective of the Kootenay School of Writing, co-curated an early webzine called The News, and is a long-time member of a group that runs the On Edge Reading Series at Emily Carr University.
Crane Poems
I’m currently working on a collection Crane Poems which will be situated with photographs of cranes (the mechanical kind) I’ve taken around the world.
Mechanical cranes operate as a temporary architecture and serve as tangible indicators of change within the space of cities.
Both functional and soaring, cranes offer a contradictory image of progress and destruction, set high above the surfaces of cities, yet dramatically rearranging what is below.
Continuing the meditations on how time operates, Crane Poems will explore the tensions of perpetual change.
FLOURISH
Out Now…
My fifth book Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography, and poetry.
You can order Flourish here: https://ecwpress.com/products/flourish
Find the listing on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44498182-flourish
Flourish, the fifth poetry collection from B.C. writer Jacqueline Turner, is a hefty collection which carries a large bandwidth of memory, intent and invention.The collection is divided generously into four parts, the first of which acts as a survey of memory, an investigation by an expert, looking back and looking through. A live journal of present-day reflections, Turner’s lavish imagery of place, thought and people with their “crepe skin” is deft. These multi-layered approaches include a pop culture starting point, a personal setting, and a literary zeitgeist for good measure, to create a unique and reflective prose poem. 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
The Library
Into The Fold
My first book Into the Fold (ECW Press, 2000) was a version of my Masters’ Thesis and explored the triptych as material language form and researched places names from the southern interior – Shuswap territory – where I grew up.
Careful
My second book Careful (ECW Press, 2003) enacted a poetics of disruption, which connected to an exploration of the classic text The Faerie Queene cross cutting literary and colloquial language.
Seven into Even
My fourth book Seven into Even (ECW Press, 2006) is prose poetry at light speed, intermingled with the luscious slowness of short line leaps. Its seven sections explore the geographical spaciousness and local landscapes of Canada.
The Ends of the Earth
In The Ends of the Earth (ECW Press, 2013) I grappled with finding connection in times of ecological destruction and my most recent book Flourish (ECW Press, 2019) examines a new kind of nostalgia in compressed prose poem forms.
Coming Soon…
I recently completed a draft of my novel The Daphnes which focuses on themes of transformation via strange phenomena. All of my books have been supported by a 22 year collaboration with my editor Michael Holmes. It’s pretty rare in publishing to maintain the same editor so I feel lucky to have that ongoing collaboration as the basis of my work.
“Early on in Flourish, Jacqueline Turner connects, or as she phrases it “inhabits,” that “space of the long dash of Emily Dickinson.” These are meditations on time—people and things caught in the space of what is long gone and what is already disappearing. Framed within that “long dash,” Turner at one early point reflects on Lucian Freud’s “Last Portrait.” She writes, “I see that moment between the real and the unreal made manifest…Is the woman being overtaken by the shaped blank space or is she fading
— Garin Cycholl, Typescript
from view, hovering conditionally in between her life and her eventual demise?”
Layered between the time it takes to think and to say something, these poems make a collage of reading itself, exploring the moment between page and memory.”
“Reading is an intimate act for Turner. The reader embarks on an exploration of voice on the page, seeking the “essential me inside the mess of being alive.” Reading becomes an act undertaken to quiet one’s own riotous thoughts as well as to embrace, at least momentarily, another’s line of thought.
The conjoined act of reading/writing establishes the emotional challenges of the poet’s “fragmentary hesitative speech parts.”. Here, Turner invokes bpNichol: “The mouth remembers what the brain can’t quite wrap its tongue around.” Turner’s writing in Flourish is an assemblage of that “brain’s tongue”—seeking selves in “memory of originary performance…[becoming] makers of the time in between.”
Reading Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish makes us want to write, to remember; also to sing, then read, then cry, and re-read. We’re reading it while thinking about reading, and remembering. 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