Seven Into Even

?Seven Into Even reworks Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in counterpoint to
the seven deadly sins, and brings these vast references through a mesh of
contemporary settings and issues in a series of poetic installations. The
number seven works as an organizing principle: the book struggles with
narrative and its constraints, questioning the development of characters as a
poetic device, and reflecting on itself as it builds. Seven Into Even is prose
poetry at light speed, intermingled with the luscious slowness of short line
leaps. Its seven sections explore the geographical spaciousness and local
landscapes of Canada. Jacqueline Turner walks her poems through the handful of
streets that make up Vancouver's Horseshoe Bay, to the Ship & Anchor in
Calgary, and invites them to notice the way the sidewalks curve and cars stop
for pedestrians - even if they're jaywalking. Her characters are unsure and
ambivalent - and yet confident enough to highlight the fallacies of knowledge,
reality, and truth. The scale of Turner's project is both daunting and
paradoxical. Like Spenser, she considers the differences between appearance
and reality, probing them for resonance. She records the noises that emanate
beyond the surface of things, building intensities through the thrill and push
of language as it rushes across the page. By playfully mixing genres, this
book undoes the distinction between high and low art with an exciting series
of linguistic collisions.