All Books

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 favour of a vigilant awareness, and wonder whatmight happen if we ‘change the feared penmanship’ and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.

‘Jen Currin writes eloquently; she writes fervently – she writes irony and truth with alarming ease … Currin’s writing is always surprising and often revelatory, punctuated by epiphanies and linguistic acrobatics … Anyone who wants to write will find this book an absolute joy to read.’

– Geist

‘Currin’s poetry … leaves us dazed and amazed at the jumble of words upon the page that fall together like so much confetti in a celebratory parade of language. We are to emerge … with the sense that we have taken a journey to an exotic land.’

– Prairie Fire Reivew of Books

‘Currin updates longstanding surrealist tropes – dreamscapes, disjointed images – with lines that would have been unthinkable to André Breton … This is a new poetry for a new century.’

– Xtra!

‘The pieces are minimalist and sharp, with a dark sense of humour … Though Currin’s surreal style invites multiple interpretations, her vivid imagery and intense storytelling make it easy for the reader to connect with these poems.’

– Shameless Magazine

These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the “Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori Culbert, Lindsay Kines and Kim Bolan’s 2001 “Missing Women” series in the Vancouver Sun. This media coverage, combined with the efforts of activists in political and cultural sectors, finally resulted in increased official investigative efforts, which have so far led to the arrest of Robert Pickton, on whose property the remains of twenty-seven of the sixty-eight listed women were found. In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in what had become one the highest-profile criminal cases to take place in B.C.’s history; yet this is not the focus of this book.

As the title suggests, the concern of this project is an investigation of the troubled relationship between this specific marginalized neighbourhood, its “invisible” populations both past and present, and the wealthy, healthy city that surrounds it. These poems interrogate the comfortable distance from which the public consumes the sensationalist news story by turning their focus toward the normative audience, the equally invisible public. In the speaker’s examination of this subject, assumptions and delineations of community, identity and ultimately citizenship are called into question. Projects such as Lincoln Clarkes’ controversial Heroines photographic series and subsequent book (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2002), news stories and even the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games circulate intertextually in this manuscript, while Pickton’s trial is intentionally absent.

Irritated by complacency, troubled by determinate narrative and the relationship between struggle and the artistic representation of struggle, Murakami is a poet bewildered by her city’s indifference to the neglect of its inhabitants.