The Ends of the Earth moves through technological disasters, environmental nightmares, and broken relationships to find love cast away at the end of days.

Its urban settings are counterbalanced with the idea of escape, deserted islands, and ocean solitudes. In this collection of playful, challenging, and beautiful poems, Jacqueline Turner uses the interrobang — a question mark combined with an exclamation point, the excited question — as a symbol of our times to move the work through a host of genres. Like notes washed ashore in bottles, this book seeks an exchange. Its scope is as vast as the question of how to survive modernity. In The Ends of the Earth, you can smell the salt air or revel in an alternate vision of the future.

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Jacqueline Turner has previously published three books of poetry with ECW: Seven into Even (2006), Careful (2003), and Into the Fold (2000). She reviews for the Georgia Straight and teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and Simon Fraser University. In 2005, she was the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane, Australia.

“Many of the texts here are openhearted or even sentimental—although always in a smart, clear-eyed fashion...Turner’s gift is for beautiful concision.” —Georgia Straight