Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton
Biography
Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet. She currently lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, the unceded territory of many Coast Salish nations, including the Qayqayt, S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), sc̓əwaθenaɁɬ təməxʷ(Tsawwassen), šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmaɁɬ təməxʷ (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, Stz’uminus, sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie) and Kwantlen. She graduated from the Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio in 2007 and attended the Emerging Aboriginal Writer’s Residency at the Banff Centre in 2009.
Her first collection of poetry, page as bone ~ ink as blood, was published with Talonbooks in 2015. Two years later she brought us her second collection, An Honest Woman, again with Talonbooks. The book was a finalist in the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category.
Jónína's third book, Standing in a River of Time, will be released in the Spring of 2022, again with Talonbooks.
Poetics Statement
“Poetry has allowed me to explore loss, the world of the unseen and the Ancestors. It offers me the ability to gesture towards memories that are incomplete, opening doorways to the thoughts and feelings that live on as dreamscapes in our psyche, inhabiting our bodies and souls. My work often walks a thin line between pain and much needed hope. I was most encouraged by this testimonial from Joanne Arnott:
“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.
Much of my poetry explores intergenerational trauma, and its effects on a family. I think Betsy Warland said it best when she offered this testimony for my second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman.
When writing from the voice of between, writer and reader have no place to hide. Assumptions and camouflage fall away. Murdered, missing, and violated women and girl voices have been silenced. The story lethally repeats. Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene.
My next collection, Standing in a River of Time, will be released in 2022, and includes both poetry and prose. I like to think of these three books as a trilogy. Each one is linked and represents the unfurling of my own understanding about my own life, my place in the world as a mixed-blood, settler, and Indigenous woman. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
rooted
for my niece Gabby
I am rooted, but I flow. – Virginia Woolf, Waves
I am a story within the stories of many
I am a paradox
one thing and then another
parts of a whole
that does not know itself
turning towards the invisible
I can see the limits of knowledge
the places where formulas dissolve
into knowing that can only come
when quiet and walking in a forest
where the standing ones watch and wait
for us to return to ourselves
to the new stories that are waiting to unfold
collective history
divergent lives meet at the border
Bogart’s on the edge, where the North End meets downtown
Winnipeg’s Studio 54, an old bank building
where deserters of their lives cross over
meet on the dance floor
Tuxedo Park boys, rich looking to drown out the voices of obligation
needed the drugs that the arsonist and the boxer provided
Portage and Main, an intersection where need meets want
and amid the inner rubble, the marble pillars, we are all playing
a transactional game where everyone is trying to trade up
in his tower the DJ – a demigod of nightly worship
takes us into trance dance
encoded in our bodies a collective history
of days when we hung mirrors on trees
where pain and pleasure reflected visceral truths
we are all crows tempted by shiny things
the mirror ball spinning light offers flickering fractures
but never invites reflection
heavy with memory my body finds wordless ways
to stir cellular recall my turtle mind slow steady
walks me to the dance floor
where my snake body dances me
I am in a moving sea of sound
within the beginning of time
an elemental dreaming born of water
inside, the oracle divines my salvation
but I am still suspicious of my body’s story
leave a trail of marooned memories frozen fragments
parts of me are scattered on the altar of one-night stands
once home haunted by my losses, I weep water meets wood
as I lie on the hardwood floor, contemplate the collective curse
in our genes
a shame carrier I am doomed to wander
I am a vortex of empty space, where
my bitterness and brooding calls out to the Hag
our dark truths passed between us like a smouldering joint
shared suffering never articulated leaves a residue
causes an itch that cannot be scratched
I am a curious contradiction like the sun and its shadow
trying to forget my own fragility
suspended between two worlds
I exist between night and day where salt becomes wisdom
and at the end of my bed, a pack of black dogs
on my lips a thickening scar tastes of toxic soup
a fog and within it a spell cast over the victims
we carry our shame to the dance floor
the crimes of our ancestors a collective illness
their “original sin” follows us to the after-hours clubs
this time rich boys and bikers occasionally an allergic reaction
earthbound alchemists we all learned that the rising
of smoke cannot be hastened
that sometimes passions are their own punishment
This poem is in my first book. page as bone ~ ink as blood and the quote at end is from Kat Duff’s book, The Alchemy of Illness (New York: Pantheon, 1993)