New Collection:
MOUTHFUL OF BEES coming late November 2021
This collection comes from Quinn's own experience as someone who both provides and uses mental health and addiction services. The collection moves between personal, communal and mythical experiences of madness to obliterate the idea that recovery is a tidy or linear event. These pieces ask us to be unflinchingly honest with how we care for each other and our environment. They ask us to be patient with each other and our inevitable mistakes while prodding at society's uncomfortable relationship with forgiveness. Finally, they challenge us to welcome resilience in all of its' messy and awkward iterations.
“This is not simply a book of recovery poems -- this is a treasure box crammed with sly prescriptions, tangled devotions, and cryptic spells for the wisdom extracted from self-reinvention beyond the limit of common understanding. Quinn's poems become medicine for stereotypes about people who experience psychosis and addiction, for those who wander the disorienting eddies of trauma. I was moved and startled by these poems, their clear-eyed and artful language tricks, a blessing. "Bless all our monsters made and changed/bless everyone who looked at you, knew & looked away."
-Alex Leslie, Vancouver for Beginners
Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs
ISBN 978-1-77126-176-0w
Shannon Quinn
In Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs Shannon Quinn explores the legacies that animate, agitate, and echo over time through families. It is an investigation of how myth responds to trauma, of how we love, how we hurt, and how we recover. Quinn engages with the possibility that in the absence of light we can summon our own profound and deeply personal magic. Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs is for those who suspect there must be a guidebook for living but fear they are the only ones who haven’t read it.
Questions for Wolf
Thistledown Press 2015
ISBN: 978-1-77187-058-0
Shannon Quinn
Questions for Wolf, Shannon Quinn’s debut poetry collection, explores desire and memory, examining the damaged lives of characters whose street smarts are their only defense against self-destruction and loss of hope. Quinn’s poems delve into a world of “inner city mortifications” as she contemplates lost innocence and how the longing to be great rather than merely good can drive people to pursue a life along society’s margins. From adolescent girls getting a taste of adulthood around a bonfire in “Bonfire” to the sex workers who hold their own on the dark streets of Quinn’s hazy, almost mythical universe, readers are transported through the “peculiar urban sprawl of being a girl” and presented with a celebratory defiance of the expectations projected onto women.
Questions for Wolf is a collection of dark yet delicate poems, celebrating the myth and magic associated with female sexuality and agency. Themes of lost innocence, damaged lives, addiction, and destitution intermingle with a celebration of life outside the margins, as Quinn weaves beautiful narratives out of the ugly bits of life. Images of childlike purity combine with tragedy as the collection follows a motley gang that includes “the morphined, the moon-shined,/the induced amnesiacs and the bicycle thieves” as they stage a revolution against polite society and “pulverize the idea of being good instead of great.”
Stark natural imagery combines with Quinn’s magic-infused metaphors as she describes liquid skies filled with stars and the simultaneously soothing and oppressive force of water as it alternates between the serene waves of a fresh hit and the sound-muffling burden placed on revolutionaries “chained to the ocean floor”. Bears, dogs, elephants, and other strange beasts including carnivorous sheep take shadowy shape throughout the collection as Quinn delves into our animal urges and confronts society’s tendency to enforce order but offer no guidance. “Where were our birders when we needed them?” she asks in “Animal Secrets”, but this probing discontent reveals fewer answers than questions.
Despite being a collection exploring wounds and sorrows, Questions for Wolf is also fundamentally about redemption as Quinn explores the strength it takes to reclaim a shattered life. Quinn dares herself to transform grief into something beautiful, and the result is an eloquent statement about hope against all odds.
"Rife with metaphors, the subject matter in Questions for Wolf can be bleak and uncomfortable, but somewhere beneath the despair and confusion, there’s hope, coupled with tender and delicate prose." — Room
"Quinn claims a wordless kinship between women and animals, not only in the title poem “Questions for Wolf”, but in many others. (This reminds me of Greek mythology, of Jason and Medea. Jason is cerebral, while Medea represents what is wild, instinctive and of the flesh). The metaphor is painful, as in “. . . our ferocity . . . learning to sit with begging thoughts”, but this animalism also gives Quinn’s woman the power to survive: “But oh look at you now/nostrils flaring/chuffing your breath”. So ultimately, paradoxically, there is hope." -- Allison Kydd