Standing in a River of Time
Standing in a River of Time merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Métis family. Kirton does not shy away from hard realities, meeting them head on, but always treating them with respect and the love stemming from a lifetime of spiritual healing and decades of sobriety. This collection unravels painful memories and a mixed-blood woman’s journey towards wholeness. The Ancestors whisper to Kirton throughout, asking her to heal, to bring them home, so that within these stories of redemption and loss the dead walk with us, their presence felt as the story unfurls in unexpected ways. Kirton does not offer false hope, nor does she push us towards answers we are not yet ready for. Instead, she gestures towards the many healing modalities she has explored as she discovers that the path to reconciliation is not only a long and winding road, but also that it begins with those closest to us.
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.”
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