Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days of trance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife.
With this collection, Kirton adds her voice to the call for the kind of fierce honesty referred to by Muriel Rukeyser when she asked, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Kirton tells her truth with gentleness and patience, splitting the world open one line at a time.
“[Kirton] retraces her Métis inheritance and her own arduous journey to becoming a twenty-first-century guide we are much in need of.”
—Betsy Warland
“Kirton’s poems are peacemaking, both generous gesture and much-needed literary poultice.”
—Joanne Arnott
By Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton, a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet, author, and facilitator, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba (Treaty One). She currently lives in the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh. Kirton graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007 where she now teaches a workshop titled Pen & Sword. She is a longstanding member of their Advisory Board. A late-blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category.
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news | 2015-08-24
Tonight! Jónína Kirton at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg
…and signing of her Spring 2015 poetry collection, page as bone – ink as blood, with special guest reader Duncan Mercredi. The …
news | 2015-04-24
We Have Liftoff! (Photos from Talon’s Spring 2015 Poetry Launch in Vancouver)
…beautifully from her first collection of poetry, page as bone – ink as blood ($16.95). Among other poems, Kirton read “What Do …
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