Flourish

"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.'

"Written from the vantage of a writer in the middle of her life and career, Jacqueline Turner's Flourish looks 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. Flourish is 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.' Yet Flourish is not Turner's end - not by far!" - Theresa Smalec, Associate Professor, Bronx Community College/City University of New York"Jacqueline Turner's Flourish is '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 of Friendly + Fire and Just Like I Like It"Reading Jacqueline Turner's Flourish makes 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 of The Outer Harbour, Performance Bond, 49th Parallel Psalm, and After 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