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.
"""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 ""Read “Abortion Blues” and weep—read “Naming My God”—“a god of / coincidence speaking the language / of bees . . .” Read every poem carefully and then start over—these are lived poems—as essential as they are hard earned. Ribcage of Time is a masterful accomplishment."" —Gary Lemons, author of Original Grace"