Flourish

by Jacqueline Turner

Overview

“Smart, clear-eyed… Turner’s gift is for beautiful concision.” — Georgia Straight on The Ends of the Earth

Jacqueline Turner’s Flourish moves between philosophy, literary criticism, biography, and poetry. Both personal and experimental, her writing becomes transformative as it explores memories of growing up in a small town, parenting a set of adventurous sons, traveling, and reading. At times her 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 emerges.

Turner takes readers to a park in Berlin set up like a messy living room, to a gallery in Granada where the view from a window beside a famous painting more perfectly frames an ancient stone wall, and to a karaoke room in Tokyo where comedic possibilities merge with spilled drinks. In the end, Flourish celebrates the abundance of words already read, while conveying gratitude for the ones still about to be read. A bold gesture, a green light, a way forward in challenging times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781773053943
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	128
File size:	541 KB

About the Author

Jacqueline Turner is the author of The Ends of the Earth (ECW Press 2013). She is a Lecturer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and has held writing residencies in Brisbane, Tasmania, Granada, and Berlin. Her work is published widely in Canada and internationally. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Read an Excerpt

“Avoid the Flourish” — Leonard Cohen, “How to Speak Poetry”

 

it was meant to be simple

we loved it and it was simple

a plain pine box as

hearts broke to cries of hallelujah

 

it was meant to be

simple

it was meant

to be

it was

meant

 

it had meaning

the people agree

as they post versions of Hallelujahs

as others post telling them

they are posting the wrong

Hallelujahs

 

a fight broke out

about who Famous Blue Raincoat

meant more to

nostalgia for a lost love

or whisper singing in bed

as a sign of contemporary intimacy

who soothes your insomnia at ‘4 in the morning/end of December’?

 

it was a gravel voice, a gravelly voice

it was profound and it sang out to the hills

it was always a hymn, it was always an anthem

it went ‘a thousand kisses deep’ or it broke open

‘the crack to let the light in’

 

it was many things

to many people

it was always a dance, always a poem

always thinly veiled fiction

it was beautiful and it was loser-ish

it was mine more than yours

yours more than mine

 

it was trouble for a troubled time

it was humility in the crease of greatness

it was always an epic, an ode

it made you cry every time

it unleashed you, untethered

it made you freer, it let you off

your flight, light, bright

it was always surrender

it was always trying to figure you out

it was always helping you, giving you courage

it was fragments and pieces, it was notions

it was always deep understanding

it was eventually

 

it was soft and you loved it

it was always from a distance

it was always ‘you look good when you’re tired’

always ‘you look like you could go on forever.’

Editorial Reviews

Written from the vantage of a writer in the middle of her life and career, Jacqueline Turner’sFlourishlooks back — longingly yet complexly — on autobiographical events and instrumental texts that have shaped the politics and poetics of her current self. The brief episodes recounted in this body of work slowly accumulate and resonate, perhaps especially for women who grew up in Canada in the 1980s and ’90s.Flourishis a quiet tornado: riveting, expansive, and profoundly moving on multiple levels. Time buckles and reverses as Turner contemplates her father’s death, her children’s entries into adulthood, and her own emergence as an established writer. As a fellow girl who was not expected to become important, I shiver with recognition at Turner’s various ‘returns to the beginning at the end.’ YetFlourishis not Turner’s end — not by far!” —Theresa Smalec, Associate Professor, Bronx Community College/City University of New York

“Jacqueline Turner’sFlourishis ‘meant to be simple.’ Isn’t it? It reads nostalgia. Here, a state of being, yearning for a time that might not have been particularly all that grand. What it wants back is not what it was. What was simple reflects without force. Such simplicity was all here too: the past and its residue, hesitant speech parts and its counterparts, trips and its trip-ups. A blueprint for what it looks like to think and feel everything at once: I'm dazzled by it.”—Danielle LaFrance, author ofFriendly + FireandJust Like I Like It

“Reading Jacqueline Turner’sFlourishmakes 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, author ofThe Outer Harbour, Performance Bond,49thParallel Psalm, andAfter 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

From the Publisher