Looking For a Turnout

Joan Finnigan

6 X 9 inches, 144 pages

LOWBROW. MIDDLEBROW. HIGBROW. Freeing the regional from the universal. Such is the work of Joan Finnigan, which has been collected, selected, revised, and revisited in Looking For a Turnout, her first book of poems in more than a decade.

The award-winning historian of the Ottawa
Valley is easily one of the most significant, if at times neglected, figures in Canadian letters
today. Her tough-knuckled poems are no exception, ranging in material and expression as plural as the poet herself.

Like her histories, which have given rich
timbre to the Valley's muted past, Finnigan's poems echo with the voices of the living and the dead: some recovered, some remembered, and some imagined.

"Some poets are poets' poets. Others appeal only to non-poets. A few poets, like Joan Finnigan, appeal to both."
- Fred Cogswell

"One of the most important writers of the long poem in Canada."
- Robert Weaver

"I'll take Yeats and the work of Finnigan."
- Anonymous book dealer

Joan Finnigan

Author, Poems

Joan Finnigan has been at the forefront of Canadian literature and oral history since the 1960s, when Robert Weaver featured her poetry on CBC Radio and the National Film Board produced her Genie award-winning screenplay The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar. She has published thirty books, half of them inspired by the Ottawa Valley, including her ground-breaking, best-selling oral histories, of which several have won prestigious regional awards.

The daughter of Ottawa Senator hockey legend Frank Finnigan and the mother of three children, Joan Finnigan was born in Ottawa and educated at Lisgar Collegiate, Carleton University, and Queen's University. She now summers at her log farmhouse on Hambly Lake north of Kingston, Ontario, and winters in Aylmer, Quebec.