Jacqueline Tchakalian

Jacqueline Derner Tchakalian, a poet and visual artist, has lived in five different states and seven cities in California. Trained as a visual artist, she discovered writing poetry later in life, at which time she quit painting for ten years. A past co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets Series and the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, her poems have appeared in Eclipse, So to Speak, California Quarterly, Westward 4, and other publications. She was a finalist in the 2010 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Poetry Contest and the 2007 Conflux Press Artists Books Contest. She currently lives in Woodland Hills, CA.


All Books

Ribcage of Time

Jacqueline Tchakalian

Publication Date: October 1, 2024

$16.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-63628-146-9

Description:

Ribcage of Time, a poetry collection from a woman’s point of view, is both intimate and universal in its scope of events—family life, birth, death, rape, abortion, genocide from a poet on the ledge of some eighty years of life with language fresh and unsettling.

The poems in Jacqueline Tchakalian’s second poetry collection, Ribcage of Time, refer to Armenian genocide, public murder, rape, home abortions, including one outside the home with tragic repercussions for the writer. These poems have an ever-present wish for improvement, a more sane and equitable society for all. They reference family, the joy of having and being around children, the predicted loss of an ill husband, a plan for a different type of god. They are reflective poems that question the future, make strong assertions, and overall are imbued with hope for the future.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Jacqueline Derner Tchakalian’s collection Ribcage of Time pulses with desire—for the body’s fleeting and insistent pleasures, for the beauty that drips honey from the world’s comb, for more of life itself despite the sting of its difficulties and departures. Wide-ranging and visceral, these poems are thrillingly frank as they chronicle rape, home-done abortions and their catastrophic aftermath, the joys of long-cherished love and lust, death’s strange and haunting impact, and history’s varied oppressions. Ribcage of Time is an inventive, painterly book with its masterful blend of light and shadow and its vivid, precise images that burn themselves on a reader’s brain.

Francesca Bell, author of Whoever Drowned Here

Questions of survival and resilience undergird poems exploring reproductive justice and political and sexual violence. “Should we bring a / mirror, hat, canoe? / Just the skin on / our backs?” asks the speaker of “Interrogation Trail.” Family life—with its loves and losses—explores “how we own,” even as we strive to reclaim “fertile terraces” and “a center that holds.” These bold poems inspire bravery and celebrate hope.

Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

The Size of Our Bed

Jacqueline Tchakalian

Publication Date: September 15, 2015

$17.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781597099974

Description:

The poems from The Size of Our Bed start with a section of a letter to a dead husband. The remaining poems traverse Armenian, English/German ancestry; marriage; others; illness and death; recovery and the bloody spine of war, always war. Jacqueline Tchakalian conjures these generous yet unflinching poems as though knowledge lodged in her bones and belly, an invisible force, had been lurking, waiting for her to peel back the visor of ignorance and disregard, with the shape and sound of poetry; its vessel acceptance, its mouth hard won wisdom and protest.