need to live
No compromise in this frontal collection presented without pretense by the publisher “like a morose book on intimacy. It is disarmingly frank, and therefore necessary. The pain of living is constant there, the search for solutions is constantly renewed. The poet, who signs her first book, often invests her own first name, searches for the words in disorder, lucid in front of what she calls: “malaise my language”. If need be, she says, “I’ll yearn / I’ll hold on // just a puff of a cigarette just / a glass of gin just my hair undone / just my weary breast in the palm of your hand.” The need to live thunders at the slightest desire, in the jumble of daily setbacks. Between beautiful dense prose and assumed free verse, she stands up to adversity, finding by naming it material to pursue an unsatisfied quest: “rachel you have something / distraught. And the other, the precarious lover, is not enough, hardly words are enough to become aware.
Hugues Corriveau
what are we playing
★★★1/2
Rachel Lamoureux, Le Quartanier “QR Series”, no 169, Montreal, 2022, 168 pages
Feel bad
“I exist better where living hurts,” the poet confides to us. This shows how this collection is not joyful. Radically painful, anxious, in search of the slightest jolt of ephemeral joy, these prose texts drift on the unstoppable suffering of conscience. “Land of small breaches”, this is what these poems are posed to “separate the thoughts of its corpses”. This relentlessness in keeping one’s eyes fixed on the almost unspeakable stems from an irrepressible need to live, when “it would be enough to open the earth to tame this migration of holey madness”. She writes to “know that she is alive, for humanity which has the depth of avalanches”. You shouldn’t be put off by this well-written proposal which deploys a certain sense of poetry, as when it fills its “bucket of foggy mornings”. Does it have to be “late to believe in the urgency of existing”? We believe her when she confides to us: “I belong to this almost cured version of light. »
Hugues Corriveau
bunkers
★★★
Sophie-Anne Landry, “Poetry” hammock, Montreal, 2022, 72 pages
The Eve of the Precipices
We enter casus belliby Anne Marbrun, by a tearing heart. casus belli, the accident of war, is the story of a love that comes undone, leaving in its wake a haze in which to lose tears: “Even if I no longer knew how to cry. If the mornings slipped their dry tongue into the cemeteries of my body. ” Despair interferes with pain, creating a deleterious daily life and disappointing ersatz: “I took other lovers, they had pain, illnesses, women. I always get the wrong lovers. The dissatisfied narrator searches existence for embers: “We want cyclones, we have eddies. » And this is the power of this collection: this desired intensity which charges the images, invites us to fight the days and arouses the curiosity of what is to come. With her poetry in prose, the poet is part of the ardent, summoning bridges and rivers, eager to take everything by avoiding the boredom of repetitions: “Eternity will be obsolete. Tomorrow will be enough. »
Yannick Marcoux
casus bellifollowed by The night is fine
★★★1/2
Anne Marbrun, Cravan Goose, Montreal, 2022, 72 pages
A Literary Omri
After a seven-year independent adventure, Éditions Omri changed name and became the Omri Collection, joining Noroît. This is the book-object I will make the hearts of apples beat, by Marc-André Foisy, who has the honor of sealing this union. Precisely, this collection is an alliance, where the economy of words is linked to the poetry of photographs – also by Marc-André Foisy -, to invite us on a sensory journey, where “there will be the birds / these little letters / who write on the sky. If we only stop at the weight of the words, we have the impression of a brief flight, but it is in the round trip of words and photographs that the collection is anchored and that unfolds poetry. The images divert the meaning of the words, enrich it or increase it tenfold, and the interplay of their complementarity is immersive. Sometimes, too, the worms exist for themselves: “with wind and a little /luck maybe/my branches will/find arms”. A hovering pleasure.
Yannick Marcoux
I will make the hearts of apples beat
★★★
Marc-André Foisy, Noroît “Omri”, Montreal, 2022, 144 pages