Lost and Gone Away

Between 2010 and 2014 Lynn Jenner made several related emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the record of these: a fascinating, ambitious hybrid text of nonfiction, prose poems and poetry. The book traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake; samples and sifts through the lost and recovered detritus of the ancient world; radiates its attention out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin; and quietly, devastatingly, explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away. An excavation of loss, in four parts, Lost and Gone Away also plumbs the ability of literature to contain, refresh and explore. The cumulative result is a fresh, sobering and searching intellectual journey – a tremendously powerful work of creative nonfiction.

Lynn Jenner began writing at the age of 49. In 2008, while studying at the International Institute of Modern letters, she received the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for the manuscript of Dear Sweet Harry, which was then published by Auckland University Press and won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Her poetry has been widely published in the literary journals, here and overseas, including Carcanet’s Oxford Poets: An Anthology, 2013.