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Séréna Jenna – Poetry…the truest form of language

14-year-old Yellowknife born Séréna Jenna started writing poetry when she was just 8 years old. Unlike every other student in her class, she took to it naturally which led her to continue pursuing it.

Since then, her passion for poetry has evolved and she has written over 200 poems in both French and English.

Each poem she writes is an expression of feelings in whichever language they were felt in at the moment of writing.

“I once read this quote, it said poetry is the truest form of language because you don’t have to filter your words. And as a human being, I have a lot of thoughts in my head or feelings that I have that I can express out loud. Poetry just suits me because it’s free, I can do what I want when I want, where I want. I can just speak.”

When it came to her publishing her poems, it was an unexpected encounter with her substitute teacher that got things rolling.

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“One of the substitute teachers came up to me at lunch and was like I read your poems, they’re really nice, and then he just goes, do you want to get your poems published? I went okay. So we just went from there and exchanged emails and phone numbers and I told my mom. Then she became my agent and slowly but surely I finished assembling my poems and we just published them. It took a year, but we did it.”

Her new book, released in December, is called EuphoriAE and it includes 100 of her poems in both languages, none of which are translated.

As for what’s next for her poetry, she says she hopes she gets to keep doing it as a hobby.

“Poetry is a really important part of my life. The book was more to have a little thing in my back pocket so when I want to get novels published, I already have this thing in my pocket. It’s really hard for first time writers to get published and now I have this advantage.”

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