Part family memoir, part poetry, part love letter to Newfoundland and its people this is a lyrical exploration of how we are fortified by the places of our foremothers and forefathers and by how they endured. Like 'ballycater', the ice that gathers in harbours along the coast, Jennifer Bowering Delisle gathers fragments of history, family lore, and poetry -- both her own and that of her great-grandparents -- to tell stories of shipwrecks, war, resettlement, and men and women's labour in early twentieth-century Newfoundland. With the deftness and haunting imagery of Michael Crummey's Hard Light, The Bosun Chair reveals the inherent gaps in ancestral history and the drive to understand a story that can never fully be told.