Desforges

Jaclyn 

award-winning literary artist

ABOUT JACLYN

JACLYN DESFORGES is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's selections for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), a picture book which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club.

Jaclyn served as the 2023/2024 Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer In Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of several prizes, including the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Jaclyn was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize.

Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in literary magazines across North America. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.

as featured in

Praise for Jaclyn’s Writing

“In ‘Wet,’ Jaclyn Desforges’s narrator dwells in the discomfort, surreality, and sacrifice that motherhood engenders, populated by such candid admissions as ‘Mother, the happiest I have ever been is in the pockets of time in which I felt alone.’ The narrator, raised by a distant stepmother, is herself the mother of young adult Julie, who has returned home for a visit only to find that her mother is caring for an unexplained gaggle of babies who are not her own. Here is where Desforges’s gift for narration begins to gleam, in all its surreal and embodied glory. Simultaneously, she crafts a unique approach to the passage of time, or lack thereof, as the narrator grapples with the hurt she carries with her from her own childhood—the narrator is both mother and daughter, forever reliving the cruelties of her girlhood while also trying to raise her own daughter free of her own fear and loneliness.

This fear has taken many forms: disordered eating, emotional and physical distance, and a devotion to self-sacrifice as her own needs are sublimated beneath those of the ‘mysterious babies.’ These struggles are rendered in detail that is both lyrical yet grounded in the unavoidable concrete facts of the body, staying faithful to the truth of motherhood in all its beauty and grotesquerie. At the heart of it all—thundering through the story toward its glistening, uncanny conclusion—is love. The all-encompassing love the narrator feels for Julie, and an innate desire that Julie should understand how enormous and unstoppable that love can be. In her author’s note, Desforges describes the struggle of constructing a short story in which the strength of the poetic language is so undeniable: “How do I move beyond beauty in order to make meaning?” Here, we find a piece that unites those essential virtues of sentence-level innovation and overall thematic coherence to create a short story that is stunning in its degree of complexity and elegance. 

CRAFT Literary

“The poems in Danger Flower are mossy, sensuous, linguistically vibrant and charged with an unapologetic, consequential desire--a desire that mothers, hunts, flees, questions and buzzes with creative force. Jaclyn Desforges writes with the wolves of fairy tales and the yellowjackets of domestic life; Danger Flower is a glittering, lush, spectral wilderness of a book.”

— Shannon Bramer, author of Precious Energy

“Desforges’ story is an artful accomplishment; the author braids Aristotle, botany, and fairy tales into a story of remarkable subtlety. The ambitious and sophisticated structure of the work results in moments of brilliant and unusual interplay between its different parts.”

— Emily Keeler, David Bezmozgis, and Elizabeth Ruth, RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award jurors

“Are fairy tales always cautionary in some core way? Fairy tales about women’s bodies and what can happen to them in the world certainly are. Ask Anne Sexton whose tortuously erotic ghost rides through Jaclyn Desforges’ eerie debut, Danger Flower. Her poems, most of them lyrics punctuated by spatial declaratives, relentless with stance and utterly contemporary (ranging from 80s Bonne Bell to 90s Tamagotchis and today’s incels and fapping to internet tits) don’t retell Snow White or Cinderella as Sexton’s Transformations (1971) did but they are certainly possessed by a similar witchy energy (also reminiscent of early Musgrave methinks), that terrifyingly sexy “thrust of the unicorn.” 

— Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews

Every line in Danger Flower, an anticipated debut collection of poetry by Pushcart-nominated poet Jaclyn Desforges, is intentional, evoking a memory, feeling, or sensation. Split into four sections, its short poems are lush and lyrical, bearing witness to the beguiling but grotesque natural world. ‘Zebra mussels cut me & I wade to shore, / dripping like murder,’ writes Desforges in the collection’s fourth poem, ‘Father Figure,’ revealing one of many intersections between pleasure and pain. An exploration of new motherhood, mortality, invisibility, and desire, Danger Flower is both timeless and timely.”

— Jessica Rose, This Magazine

“Juxtaposing layers of remembrances and Haiku-like truths, Homecoming is a masterful touchstone of inhabitable depth. Rueful wit trades in melancholia as it plays carefully with the past, cradling all the fragile smallness that we’re born from.”

— Ed Clayton, Short Works Prize juror

“From the captivating opening sentence to the stunning finale, The Gall is a dreamlike study of aching motherhood and loss and almost mythological stories of tragic misunderstanding. The imagery is particularly fresh and powerful and visceral: the reader cannot help but be moved.”

— Brent van Staalduinen, Short Works Prize juror

“Jaclyn Desforges is a master of cadence. The deft use of rhythm and repetition throughout this collection inspires the kind of confidence that allows you to enter the world of the poems and forget for a moment that you’re sitting in a chair, in your house, holding a book. Although, I don’t think Danger Flower’s speaker would appreciate being called the master of anything. Not because she lacks confidence, but because she understands that control and dominance are illusions. She knows, with a humble certainty, that nature will always win out, that we’re just “a universe of bodies, / back and forth in palms.” Flora, and fauna, and sex. It’s a privilege to be an early reader of Danger Flower. A truly transformative debut.”

— Molly Cross-Blanchard, author of Exhibitionist

Awards & Recognitions

  • For a short story, "Wet"

  • Shortlisted for a short story, “Grief”

  • For a short story, “Wet”

  • For a short story, “Wet”

  • For a short story, “WET”

  • For Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020)

  • For Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2021)

  • For creative writing

  • For creative writing + community work

  • For Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020)

  • For Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020)

  • For creative writing

  • Research and Creation component of the Explore and Create Program awarded for the creation of a book of short fiction

  • Winner of both the Hamilton Public Library Freda Waldon Award for Fiction & the Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd. Award for Poetry

  • For a short story, The Gall

  • For a poem, Crabapples