Böcker av Jen Currin

Poetry. LGBT Studies. BC Poetry in Transit selection (poem displayed on Vancouver city buses). Poems from THE SLEEP OF FOUR CITIES selected as Poems of the Day on US websites Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. 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. She has created an enchanted universe--where senses quiver, and colors are so saturated, they're almost hallucinogenic. But beauty draws the reader close, only to plunge into emotional risk: everything is transient and uncertain. Even nostalgia is uncomfortable, like 'working...a new glove, ' as if memories had arrived in the wrong size...There's no complacency here; Currin's bold lyric poems startle readers awake.--Foreword Reviews 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 Review of Books Jen Currin's THE SLEEP OF FOUR CITIES comes into Canadian poetry with the same electric intimacy as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon brought to the drawing rooms of Europe a century ago, and with a similar omnipresent dimensionality burning on the shore between touch and cognition. Currin's poems are reminiscent of Don Domanski's or John Ashberry's, except that with Currin's every link between every seemingly random image is precisely contained by a rigorous set of story-telling rules. Think Marilyn Bowering's Autobiography meets Erin Mouré in a gallery of brilliantly coloured painterly surfaces with their roots in wisdom literature and folk-tale magic, and you have a hint of it. With this volume, an entire tradition, with its roots in Latin American and Eastern European poetry, all shaped with the rigour of the New York School in which Currin trained, has the potential to inspire and define a generation. There hasn't been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susannah Moodie...--A rc Poetry 'My mask hangs by a threat, ' writes Jen Currin, and indeed an air of menace suffuses these brilliantly erotic and dangerous poems. Currin is a startling new talent who bears watching.--John Ashbery

Fiction. 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 heartbreaking 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 change, spirituality, and sex. Currin welcomes the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.

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.

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currins 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 lifes barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currins 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.