A lightness called pain
Jean-Christophe Réhel has established himself well in the Quebec literary landscape, but in Taurus Taurus, his sixth collection of poetry, his poetic figure searches for itself: “I never know if I am there”. Could he have found refuge in a tree? “The houses for sale are too expensive / There is only one branch of a tree left to sell for six hundred thousand / It’s a good price,” he quips. Perhaps it is because it is so high up that we recognize it from afar, consumed by introspective verses where doubt, irony and an existential quest come together in a dance of shaggy metaphors. The sap of his words is abundant and invites us to a slippery reading where the confessions seem to be woven in apparent simplicity. However, at the heart of this aerial arabesque, an image sometimes sends us to the ground, forcing us to stop our emotions: “I’m looking for a friend / To say what? / Everything I say when I don’t speak. » Réhel is not reinventing the wheel, but should we be surprised: “The problem is that I always have the same face / The same forever. »
Yannick Marcoux
Taurus Taurus
★★★ 1/2
Jean-Christophe Réhel, Del Busso, Montreal, 2024, 80 pages
A digital skin house
Artificial intelligence, more than ever, is at the heart of the news, and the debate is brewing: is it a threat or a valuable ally? With I watch porn when I’m sad, Sayaka Araniva-Yanez also offers to tear off her shirt, but this time to do battle lasciviously and intimately with a bot (the machine) integrated into her computer. The result is shocking. Rather than inviting pornographic voyeurism, the machine returns the poetic figure to itself: “this skinned body is that of the machine and the body of the machine is mine”. Troubled, melancholy and vulnerable, their exchanges are revealed in an inspired and breathless lyricism, where the passion is as vibrant as it is ephemeral: “I form a walking territory / enveloped in haunted flesh”. Profoundly original, this proposal explores the shifting boundaries of our time, where the body, the first territory of existence, is a threatened habitat: “YOU Am I going to die in your wear / THE MACHINE: perhaps you could answer yourself -even to this question.”
Yannick Marcoux
I watch porn when I’m sad
★★★★
Sayaka Araniva-Yanez, Triptych, Montreal, 2024, 108 pages
Poetry of the country
How can we not recognize the capital importance ofOde to the Saint Lawrence of Gatien Lapointe, also founder of Écrits des Forges, through his writing and his nationalist spirit? As with Alfred DesRochers, he made an act of recognition. Jacques Paquin offers us, in the always relevant bnm collection of Presses de l’Université de Montréal, a critical edition of this collection, to which he adds a reading of I belong to the earth. In his preface, the researcher guides us in the precise dimensions of his contribution, but also encourages us to find other information elsewhere that seems essential to him. Unpublished works and testimonials are also offered. But what matters, without a doubt, is to reconnect with the commitment of this founding text. Hearing again the poet confide to us: “My language is from America / I was born from this landscape”, while we penetrate with him this “Space and time oh very carnal sentence”. He states: “I give voice to everything that lives / I give confidence I give momentum”.
Hugues Corriveau
Ode to the Saint-Laurent, preceded by I belong to the earth
★★★★
Gatien Lapointe, PUM “bnm”, Montreal, 2024, 245 pages
Living despite the explosion
You have to reread The song of the creatures of Saint Francis of Assisi, to whom Nadine Ltaif refers expressly, to better understand the compassion present in his texts. Long before the testimony of her anger and what it could cause in the bitter wound to the soul, the poet loves, intruding into the heart of the living, between the birds and the flowers. This may seem far from the tragedy of the explosion in the port of Beirut, which, however, is the rebellious center of this work. “How to survive horror? » It is precisely through this appeal to nature that the poet finds hope: “We will be brothers and sisters in the way / of Saint Francis”, she says, and it is like him, in his Song, which is given “by the air and the cloud and the serene sky and all weather”. Ltaif, faced with tragedy, transforms: “That day, I decided to / shed my skin / to become alive […] // Without the faculty of moral judgment — / to rediscover the wild taste / of the wind and the noise / it makes in the trees. » His writing is beautiful and effective.
Hugues Corriveau
Song of the Creatures
★★★
Nadine Ltaif, Éditions du Noroît, Montreal, 2024, 88 pages