The Ends of the Earth: Poems book cover

The Ends of the Earth: Poems

Author(s): Jacqueline Turner (Author)

Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: 1 April 2013
Language: English
Print length: 103 pages
ISBN-10: 1770411143
ISBN-13: 9781770411142

Book Description

The Ends of the Earth moves through technological disasters, environmental nightmares, and broken relationships to find love cast away at the end of days.

Its urban settings are counterbalanced with the idea of escape, deserted islands, and ocean solitudes. In this collection of playful, challenging, and beautiful poems, Jacqueline Turner uses the interrobang — a question mark combined with an exclamation point, the excited question — as a symbol of our times to move the work through a host of genres. Like notes washed ashore in bottles, this book seeks an exchange. Its scope is as vast as the question of how to survive modernity. In The Ends of the Earth, you can smell the salt air or revel in an alternate vision of the future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Many of the texts here are openhearted or even sentimental–although always in a smart, clear-eyed fashion…Turner’s gift is for beautiful concision.” —Georgia Straight

About the Author

Jacqueline Turner reviews for the “Georgia Straight” and teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and at Simon Fraser University. In 2005, she was the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Judith Wright Center of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of “Careful,” “Into the Fold,” and “Seven into Even.” She lives in West Vancouver, British Colombia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Ends of the Earth

Name: The Ends of the Earth: Poems
Author: Jacqueline Turner (Author)
ISBN: 9781770411142

Poems

By Jacqueline Turner

ECW PRESS

Section I: A CRITIQUE OF THE APOCALYPSE

11-11-11

    oh weighted ones
    you watch an occupation
    of city city city city
    wait for a baby to be
    born around the other
    side of the world wonder
    at rain outside the window
    “it had been raining for days
    and the people were growing scared”
    dream of the ends of things embedded
    in the beginnings where fingers lightly press
    to create such pleasure always figured as explosions
    or fire burning brightly or extinguishing ceremonially
    hazards quite still for ever revving sentiments in conversation
    or missing from indexes in books about you and your peculiar collective
    you were there maybe not in the centre of things perhaps even slightly to the right
    sheets of paper you forgot stack and stack rising up to overwhelm your minimalist aesthetic
    quick take a photo out the window post it on Twitter to document your working conditions
    say sentence structure one more time your head will explode “literally”
    connect by writing more reference letters with accurate altruism
    as a way to make things happen in the real world economy
    if you got your exchange then yay! you’ll travel far
    granted in some excess a flight to the ends
    of the earth

BROUGHT BACK DOWN TO EARTH WITH A BANG OR THE DAY STARTS WITH A BANG

    1.
    break it open simply
    one big interrobang
    rhetorical/excited or interrogative
    spiritual in a typewritten font
    search for a jargon to save you/us

    2.
    open form virtue craves
    cadences that should be banned
    rivers get written up and
    their energy sold such paper
    convergences belie your/our
    fingers stroking the clay bed
    or searching for clay babies
    to dry where rocks lie in the sun

    3.
    is there no way to bracket off
    this run so your/our government eye
    skips across the space of so many
    documents to read over

    4.
    it hurts your/our interpunct to say stop
    or pause a moment at least to hear the frogs
    of Eagleridge eat pavement see how the light
    pounds through the clearing into Horseshoe Bay
    tick off another bullet on your/our list
    proclaim in solidus: “Olympic ready”
    f

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