Part family memoir, part poetry, part love letter to Newfoundland and its people, The Bosun Chair is a lyrical exploration of how we are fortified by the places of our foremothers and forefathers and by how they endured.

Like 'ballycater,' the ice that gathers in harbours along the coast, Jennifer Bowering Delisle gathers fragments of history, family lore, and poetry-both her own and that of her great-grandparents-to tell stories of shipwrecks, war, resettlement, and men and women's labour in early twentieth-century Newfoundland. With deftness and haunting imagery, The Bosun Chair reveals the inherent gaps in ancestral history and the drive to understand a story that can never fully be told.

Jennifer Delisle is the author of The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration (WLUP 2013) as well as numerous articles on Canadian literature, post-immigrant generations, and nostalgia. Her poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies across North America, and her book of poetry and family memoir, The Bosun Chair, is forthcoming with NeWest Press. She completed her PhD in English at UBC, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Alberta and McMaster. She is now the Lead Instructional Designer for Yardstick, an eLearning development company.

Jennifer Delisle's profile page

Praise for The Bosun Chair:
"A treasure-box of Newfoundland lore, collected by the great-granddaughter of not one, but two, shipwreck-braving poets, The Bosun Chair's seamless movement between memoir, poetry, interview and historical document echoes Ondaatje's early genre-blending lyric prose. Deslisle tenderly imagines a family history of the ancestral Newfoundland she never knew."
~ Sonnet L'Abbé, author of A Strange Relief
"[T]he author's delicate language will have you feeling comfortable as you swing from moment to moment and piece together her myriad stories."
~ WHERE Edmonton
"Poetic linking throughout the book ... reminds us of the gaps in our own identity. In the end, Delisle helps us realize that construction of identity is an ongoing, slippery and deliberate journey."
~ Elizabeth Johnston, Atlantic Books Today
"The Bosun Chair, with its transparency of process and its artful blend of reportage, poetry, and prose, shines a light on migration's dark sea."
~ Susan Olding, The Malahat Review
"[The Bosun Chair] resonates with a subtle charm and quiet beauty, and the small outports of Newfoundland indeed become our imagined place, as well as Delisle's."
~ Suzanne James, Canadian Literature