Noroît
Laurence Veilleux will lean into Go to the body on funeral rites, pursuing an intimate quest. It is about finding the word again, perfecting the reminiscences when faced with the death of the father, or of a grandmother or even of a certain Aurélienne. “A little girl mimes a corpse / in front of her mother / holds back a tear for the pain / a tear for the trick // a father locks his daughter / at the bottom of a coffin / she grows / perched in the darkness.” As always with Veilleux, the poetic sense is on alert. We will probably come back to it. We would be remiss not to highlight the publication in a bilingual edition (translated by Chantal Ringuet) of Diving into the wreck (Diving into the Wreck) ofAdrienne Rich. These poems from 1971-1972 allowed the poet to win the National Book Award in 1974. This radical work, which finally had to be translated, draws on a whole section of North American feminism: “I am alone, / beating the last rotting logs / with their strange smell of life, not death, / wondering what all this could have become.”
October 7 and September 24
The very moment
Two collections that should be highlighted. First, An inventory of silenceswhich examines the difficulty of a couple breaking up at the very moment when a young woman and her partner wanted to start a family. The very current words of Marie-Eve Muller uses an oral language that draws on a daily life so close that it overshadows. Between a search for a place of survival and the obsession of going away, the word is woven. At its closest: “I make a list of things / that I miss since you left / they all come down to / an inventory of silence.” As for Alexandre Leboeufhe offers us his Boreal Ceremonies. This collection is announced as “mystical incantations”, nothing less. Accustomed to Greek mythological research, the author goes deep into the inevitable memory that joins nature, origins and Time. Gatien Lapointe may not be far away when we read: “I come from the wild fauna / from the tenacious flora / from the fields of flowers in joy / I come from the majestic St. Lawrence River.” The unvarnished naivety already makes these verses touching.
Already in bookstores
Red Herbs
The mouth to show a series of blades will trace “some stinking memories”. One can only be intrigued. First collection of Megane Desrosiersthe little we know about it makes us salivate. This poetry has violent, merciless tones. There are inevitably after-effects for whom insults were the original balm of speech. “When shame overflows, a voice arises, coming from above, raining insults on his head” as the accompanying text specifies: “Small and dirty and nothing, cursed crust, cursed crumbled from the ancestor who goes back, cursed scratched from the plate, cursed loss, cursed wafer.” We will come back to this, because this little that is offered to us makes us want to delve deeper into this hole of distress. As for Noémie Royshe is on her second collection with The shooting pin. Confronting the fact of giving birth to wonder and curse, the poet contrasts the world that awaits the newborn and the maternal world that she offers him. Summed up like this, it is almost cliché: “me, mothers, monsters / the source of misfortunes / the marvelous human / that I hate with love / it is absurd like a sun / that turns around the sun”. But we will see.
September 27 and October 18
Bush poets
Beirut in flames. Silo 12 has exploded. 300,000 people homeless, 6,500 injured, 200 victims: the subject of a poetry that bears witness. The “I” will be plural to express what he is suffering from, in what the publisher announces as “a fragmented, traumatic and post-traumatic syntax”. Poètes de brousse opens the way to Nada Sattouf, which offers us in Requiem of an Afternoon that the victims become “text-trace and proof”. Few words are sometimes enough to make a tragedy heard: “A green board / angry chalks for the end / of the future Verb”. It is therefore in front of a text of heavy urgency that we will find ourselves, a necessary text and work of memory in order to counter the catastrophe that we so often believe to be unstoppable. As for Sarine Demirjianshe will speak to us about Armenia, a country also wounded, in its deep roots. The in-between that unfolds here gives a plural vision of the world: past-present, home-country, Montreal-Yerevan. The poet must “minimize / the extent / between / the heart and the body”. Rethink history, the present, the genocide in this “identity tug-of-war”. However, “the dance steps make the ground tremble / covered with trees / uprooted”. Hope is not dead.
September 23.
The Quartanier
The new collection of Nicholas Giguere, Real effectsinvests a “voice that is difficult to identify”. This voice “that never says I”, which thus “stammers, stammers, hesitates, whispers, affirms, categorizes, shouts, vociferates”. Nothing less. Fearing nothing, the publisher Le Quartanier even says that he “draws a new cosmogony”. Let’s see: “unjust is the ground sound / impermanence”. Even if we can hear the “ground sound” here, we wonder how it is “unjust”. When it is not abstruse, like these “headlong flights / abysmal rivers / deadly feasts / in disorder”, we are left speechless in front of the “synapses / on the reel”. It is not always as terrible, but it is always as thin.
Already in bookstores