The reasons of the heart have always found a way in the work of Stéphanie Filion if we think of the collection co-written with Valérie Forgues, Jane Forever (2018), and at We the living (2015), all published in Lizard Lovers.
Her narrative poetry here tells the story of Diane Hébert, the first Quebecer to receive a double heart-lung transplant in 1985 after the discovery of a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism.
The poet weaves into this story elements of her own life and her memories marked by anxiety in a style that is not unrelated to the collection of Mathieu Simoneau, which has also just been published.
“I would have liked to be a fern / a cloud a pebble washed by the river / it is exhausting work / to have a beating heart”
In this cardiogram of two lives where one admires the courage of the other since it would be easier than “to dive into what [la] haunts”, the poet slips imperceptibly into the skin of Diane Hébert. Thus, the “you” and the “I” become inseparable, forming a “we” never named, but loquacious.
The collection retraces the entire journey of the transplant patient, with her strengths and weaknesses. It’s the history of Quebec in the 1980s that dances on Like a Virgineat chicken cacciatore and hope with Diane Hébert…
Stéphanie Filion, who “let the world enter” into her “bare heart”, gives the impression of having found in the one who died at 51 in 2008 a sister and probably more. Diane Hébert, who encouraged the idea of organ donation, had the same first name as the poet’s mother.
memory heart
Stephanie Filion
The loving lizard
124 pages