The Bosun Chair

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.