A lyric unravelling of painful memories and a Métis women's journey towards wholeness.
Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet and a graduate of the Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio, where she is an instructor and their BIPOC Auntie. A late-blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 City of Vancouver's Mayor's Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. A board member of the Indigenous Editors Association, she works with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors and poets. Her first collection of poetry, page as bone - ink as blood, was released by Talonbooks in 2015; Joanne Arnott described it as "restorative, intimate poetry, drawing down ancestral ideas into the current moment's breath." Talonbooks released her second collection, An Honest Woman, in 2017. It was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Betsy Warland said of it: "Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene."
