Without Beginning or End

In my palliative months / the cormorant leaves me / at peace, disintegrating / with the exhalation of a Buddha

Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire, who connects the poet to “the ligatures of life.” Those ligatures in turn c...