Jacqueline Haskell made the 2019 Cinnamon Literature Prize shortlist, with a sequence of poems from a collection she’s currently working on, entitled The Short Shelf Life of Hearts. This January we publish Jacqueline’s poetry collection, Stroking Cerberus: Poems from the Afterlife, as part of the Spotlight Books series.
Through the prism of Haskell’s identity as a deaf poet come the themes of communication—or miscommunication—across worlds, languages and between the living and the dead.
Mythical dogs, the dead who mourn the living, and the sorrow of those reincarnated, join hands around Jacqueline Haskell’s unique and very personal poetic Ouija board to resonate with the living, the dead and all those in-between. As forcible as they are humorous, these are poignant and thought-provoking poems.