Books
Cover design by Jennifer Rawlinson
“Written with the fearlessness, ferocity and dark humour of a survivor, The Only Card in a Deck of Knives is a powerful hybrid collection about blooms and rot, youth and death, and the marks that abuse and illness leave on a life.”
— Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points
THE ONLY CARD IN A DECK OF KNIVES (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020)
Shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
“The Only Card in a Deck of Knives is a groundbreaking new collection in the area of sickness poetry. Within these poems, Lauren Turner aims to reclaim the "hysterical" label given to sick women throughout history. Rather than shying away from the emotional urgency and raw vulnerability surrounding a terminal diagnosis, Turner shines an interrogative light upon it. These fierce poems are written from the perspective of a twentysomething female speaker with a terminal disease, a speaker who is preoccupied with maintaining the illusion of health, but then refers to herself as "dying" in the next line. Fascinated and repelled by the societal impulse to gussy up diseases that take violent, and sometimes deadly, tolls upon women’s bodies, Turner uses these lyric poems to juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence encountered by women and non-binary people in society. The Only Card in a Deck of Knives unpacks society’s impulse to pull away from sick women and examines why we discredit their professed pain, symptoms and emotions.”
AUGUST 2020
112 pages | ISBN 978-1-989496-09-1
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Wolsak & Wynn
Drawn & Quarterly (Montréal)
Glass Bookshop (Edmonton)
Massy Books (Vancouver)
Octopus Books (Ottawa)
Queen Books (Toronto)
WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO BETTER NEXT TIME (knife | fork | book, 2018)
A contemporary retelling of the Samson and Delilah parable, set in Montréal. Coffeeshops, hedonism, and scissors. The wounded are alluring before you realize they can’t turn it off.
MARCH 2018
30 pages | ISBN 978-1-989355-14-5
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*now out-of-print, available as an eBook
Cover design by Norman Nehmetallah
Art by Ashley Dale
“These poems are exceptional, and the whole chapbook makes this relationship into a deeply relevant and deeply real feeling story. This book is exceptionally playful, and is so funny, but Turner does owe me a few apologies for the many lines that snuck in around the humour to stick deep in. I was amused and felt targeted the whole time. You're really not going to do better than this chapbook.”
— John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Junebat