Kirjahaku

Award–winning author Jen Currin presents remarkable and sometimes magical new stories of queer friendship and love, against the backdrop of city life. The stories in Disembark feature queer characters navigating new worlds, new circumstances, and new methods of relating to the people around them. With resonant imagery and clear, lyrical prose, Jen Currin weaves vibrant narratives showcasing queer relationships—be they platonic, romantic, or somewhere in between. A banshee shacks up with a lesbian couple in a rocky relationship, a lonely teen is gifted a knife by their mother’s boyfriend, a queer woman finds herself heartbroken when her best friend fails her at a crucial moment, and a young alcoholic hashes things out with their mother in the afterlife. In modes both realist and fantastic, the profound and eloquent stories in Disembark provide a glimpse into the unexpected, offering insight into the ways we relate in this world and in worlds beyond.

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currin's new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes life's barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currin's poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography -- only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds ...This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry! A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary Award! In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for capturing the complexities of lived experience. In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time -- war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer and the erosion of personal rights -- fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal. Trying to make sense of a world where even language is 'a danger,' Currin's poems reject the old storylines in favor of a vigilant awareness, and wonder what might happen if we 'change the feared penmanship' and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.

A 2015 ReLit finalist A 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist Shortlisted for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award 'It offers wit, precision of speech, weird connections, odd juxtapositions, jarring images, & a variety of moods in a swirl of sentences that refuse to stay still but argue with each other & with their readers. This School is well worth attending.'--Eclectic Ruckus "Her poetry is a subversion of the dominant paradigms in this country ...one ride that will leave you gripping both sides of the canoe."--Lambda Literary Review At times a call to action and at others an intimate conversation between friends, Jen Currin's sensual and surreal poems speak to the political upheavals and environmental catastrophes of our time. School is an instruction manual for igniting transformation through a collective effort of love and community. Jen Currin's books of poetry include Hagiography and The Inquisition Yours, which won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Award.

The Globe 100 (The Globe & Mail's favourite books of 2018). Silver IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Awards). Hider/Seeker is the debut fiction collection from award-winning poet Jen Currin. These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality. They take place in cafes, in snowy woods, on city street corners, and at Zen retreats - where conversations happen in the margins of books and filthy shoes are treated with reverence. Ex-wives reunite only to be confronted with their past; an aunt believes she has made a heart-breaking discovery about her niece; a seemingly never-ending hysterical pregnancy becomes the talk of a cafe. These stories are always unflinchingly honest in their portrayal of relationships - in particular the relationships of the book's LGBTQ+ characters - as they navigate spirituality, monogamy, and sex. Currin invites the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.

Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in 'The Sleep of Four Cities' use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities-cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss-with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked-they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers. "Currin's poetry attends us, lighting the ball at midnight, where first love and first terror are arm-in-arm, waiting in their figurative, gesticulating disguises to welcome us to a primitive happiness." - Rain Taxi

Heartsick, reverent, irreverent, and quietly political, Trinity Street is the much-anticipated fifth collection from poet Jen Currin, winner of the Audre Lorde Award and a Lambda finalist. While Trinity Street is in fact an actual street in Vancouver, it is also the site of an imaginary garden and imperfect utopia in the title poem of this new collection. Currin’s poems weave together the meditative and the disruptive, the queer and quotidian, and the worlds of the dead and the living. Connections are made through prayer and protest; friendships are forged on a planet challenged by climate crisis, collective grief, and the perils of late capitalism. These poems vibrate with unexpected shifts and precise, startling imagery, the touchstones of a poet whose work critics have described as “thrilling,” “emotionally evocative,” and “revelatory.”