Takotsubo – Jacqueline Haskell
ISBN: 9781788641616
£9.99
The heart is perhaps the most widely used symbol in poetry—ubiquitous and cross-cultural, the heart is an organ of perception, one of the body’s brains as well as an image of romantic love, joy and despair. Setting out to explore ‘the flesh and blood of the organ’ in this journey of a transplant, Jacqueline Haskell excavates the metaphor with extraordinary intelligence and skill. Moving from science to the heart as an organ of memory, passion and so much more, the poetry in this collection is inventive and perspective-shifting, layering fact and emotion, folklore and ritual, mortality and life. Fascinating and deeply moving, Takotsubo is a compelling collection made all the ore so by its precision and suppleness of language.
To write about the heart is a bold move. But Jacqueline Haskell is nothing if not bold. Her poetry is also subtle and unexpected. A parrot attends a funeral, a heart is carried inside a rucksack crossing borders. These poems can be visceral, charting the bizarre ordeals of treatment, indignities of hospitalisation, the heart’s failures and vicissitudes. They can be exquisitely lyrical following memory and longing on a quest through tall trees in the forest. Literal or metaphorical? Both. Her poems teeter on the brink of death reaching for the quick of life in all its mystery.
Maria Jastrzębska
Jacqueline Haskell’s new collection Takotsubo is a carefully balanced, moving and no-nonsense pilgrimage of the heart as it journeys inside and outside the body. This is an agile, visually breathtaking and imaginative collection with an unflinching eye for what we say, what we think and how we behave in liminal spaces between life and death, love and pain and stability and chaos. Takotsubo is where poetry and surgery work their symbiotic magic and make complete sense in the same space: ’he shaves/listens to Costello while he operates/almost orders chocolates’ typifies Haskell’s lyrical wit, and arrows home a world where life-dependent precision and distraction coexist and turn the world and us one way or the other. Read this to shake up and re-understand what you thought you knew about the heart and its many carriers.
Author biography
Jacqueline Haskell has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Her first poetry collection, Stroking Cerberus, was published by Myriad Editions in 2020 as part of the Spotlight Books series for underrepresented writers. Her poems have appeared in Atrium, Brittle Star, Dream Catcher, The High Window, Anomaly Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Broken Spine, amongst others.
Her short stories and flash fiction have won prizes in numerous literary competitions, including the Bridport Prize and the Asham Award, and her debut novel, The Auspice, was a finalist in both the 2018 Bath Novel Award and the 2020 Cinnamon International Literature Prize.