The poems in What the Dead Want have grown out of a sense of social outrage, an immense love of this creatured world, wild nature, and out of Paulette Claire Turcotte’s own journey through madness and Grace. They’ve grown out of a precious relationship with love and death, and hope. The boundaries between the living and the dead are more porous than we would like to think. Turcotte’s poems are her way of journeying when she is not dreaming and making art. They are her way of giving form and character to the unseen and unheard, the shadows, the untouchables, the unredeemed, and of stretching the boundaries between madness and sanity, between the banal and the mystical in an attempt to restore our quivering humanity.

Paulette Claire Turcotte's profile page

Known for her work with dreams and creativity, Paulette Claire Turcotte has worked 30 years in Jungian analysis and studies, and more than 40 years in the arts. She is an author, visionary and outsider poet and artist. Her work has been published in numerous presses in print and online. She is editor of Banned Poetry, cdris/ARTS Press, co-founder of Split Quotation Press, a founding member of the Pacific Festival of the Book, Curator of a ZINE- Alternative & Modern Arts and Review and an AVANT-GARDE poetry ZINE. She has been recipient of the ANTHOS Poetry prize and a Canada Council grant for writing (short stories). As well as two non-fiction books, she has three chapbooks of poetry with her art, and has a new chapbook, The Silence in the Centre of Bone available in 2019.