Death, desire, and divination are the threads running through Jónína Kirton’s debut collection of poems and lyric prose. Delicate and dark, the pieces are like whispers in the night – a haunted, quiet telling of truths the mind has locked away but the body remembers. Loosely autobiographical, these are the weavings of a wagon-goddess who ventures into the double-world existence as a mixed-race woman. In her struggle for footing in this in-between space, she moves from the disco days of trance dance to contemplations in her dream kitchen as a mother and wife.

With this collection, Kirton adds her voice to the call for the kind of fierce honesty referred to by Muriel Rukeyser when she asked, What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. Kirton tells her truth with gentleness and patience, splitting the world open one line at a time.

Jónína Kirton, a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet, author, and facilitator, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba (Treaty One). She currently lives in the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples. Kirton graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007 where she now teaches a workshop titled Pen & Sword. She is a longstanding member of their Advisory Board. A late-blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category.Her interest in the stories of her Métis and Icelandic ancestors is the common thread throughout much of her writing. In 2018 her poem, untethered, about her mixed ancestry, was selected to be a part of the Winnipeg wall to wall mural festival. A picture of the mural can be found at her website.Kirton’s first collection of poetry, page as bone – ink as blood, was released with Talonbooks in 2015. Joanne Arnott described this collection as “restorative, intimate poetry, drawing down ancestral ideas into the current moments breath.” Her second collection, An Honest Woman, was released in 2018 with Talonbooks and was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Betsy Warland had this to say about An Honest Woman: “Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene.”Her interest in equity and inclusion was behind the creation of Turtle Island Responds, a news related online poetry series. Kirton believes lived experience should get more attention than what is normally on offer from the news and saw this series as a way to create more space for those who often find their communities misrepresented or passed over. This series was a short-term project which she developed and curated with the assistance and support of Room Magazine where she was a board member for several years. It featured emerging and established poets and can be found at roommagazine.com/turtle-island-responds.Kirton currently considers herself to be in semi-retirement and one of her “part-time” jobs is doing manuscript consults either as a self-employed consultant or as one of Betsy Warland’s mentors in the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.

Jónína Kirton's profile page

“page as bone – ink as blood is restorative, intimate poetry, drawing down ancestral ideas into the current moment’s breath. Writing from a place of ‘curious contradiction,’ ‘of skin a little wild,’ Kirton begins by re-spinning the threads of indigenous immigrant, and poem by poem shoves the shuttle forward and back, remaking human integrity from ghosts and bloody matter. In these words, skin is not a barrier but a doorway through which the worlds stride. Kirton’s poems are peacemaking, both generous gesture and much-needed literary poultice.”
—Joanne Arnott

“Kirton’s poems are peacemaking, both generous gesture and much-needed literary poultice.”
—Joanne Arnott

“Jónína Kirton’s memoir in verse could be an epic novel, a haunting ballad, a film noir. What it is: a visitation by ghosts and spirits, familial secrets, and retrieved historical mis-memories. As intermediaries between European and Indian cultures, she retraces her Métis inheritance and her own arduous journey to becoming a twenty-first-century guide we are much in need of.”
—Betsy Warland

“These are poems out of a woman’s experience and the matriarchy. Some of the most moving and affecting poems within the collection are love letters to the writer’s/speaker’s mother, who has died from breast cancer. … Kirton avoids outright confessional by raising the question of what voice is and can be, and does this as a poet. … introducing the awareness of human fallibility and how “story” is fraught, gives the writing authenticity and the writer welcome authority. Moments like this in writing are hard won and as such are to be treasured and sustained.” — The Maynard

“[Kirton] retraces her Métis inheritance and her own arduous journey to becoming a twenty-first-century guide we are much in need of.”
—Betsy Warland

“Jónína Kirton sifts through her life – our lives – picking up piercing images and sorting stories of the senses, exploring the push-pull of being human, the delight and ambivalence of being in our own skin. Slowly, by being faithful to the moments, her poems find fragments of freedom by telling the truth.”
—Oriah Mountain Dreamer