A selection of Hugues Corriveau and Florence Morin-Martel
Activist nudity
It has happened on many occasions that activists have decided to carry out stunts while undressed, striking the imagination each time. We only have to think of the feminist movement Femen, whose members defended their beliefs topless, with slogans written on their chests and stomachs. In his new collection of poetry published by Éditions Noroît, Manifest skin, Jonathan Lamy pays a vibrant tribute to all those who use their flesh as a tool of resistance. “Naked bodies form / words on the ground denounce / the second gulf war / the civil war in Liberia / naked bodies challenge / dictatorship repression / everywhere on the planet / naked bodies united / for climate justice / right to breastfeed to abort / the skin is obvious. » With skill and clarity, the author deplores in the same breath the fact that the naked women observed in famous paintings are condemned to anonymity. “We know who painted / the painting its name / ordered it bought / then bequeathed to the museum / these people these men / dead have names / but the naked body / has no name. » A strong work from start to finish.
Florence Morin-Martel
Injury inventory
With The list of my joins, Évelyne Ménard signs a first book that grips the guts. The narrator plunges us into the heart of her physical and mental wounds. Tinnitus, anxiety, sprained ankle: the pain torments her on a daily basis. But of all the problems, eating disorders are the most pervasive. Throughout the pages, the author brings to life with her pen striking and original images to talk about anorexia: “I come up against the utensils / cavities and fractures / like someone breaking into / their own jaw”. If on the one hand she describes the violence of this illness, she then goes on to relate the difficulty of recovery. “Trust wears a candy dress / sags a little / when you lick her ear without warning / when you explain / you’ve gained weight / it looks good on you / my pupils spill out / onto my stomach / my body which knows all the mirrors / only hears the first sentence. » In this dark work, the light ends up bursting out when we no longer expected it. “I do anything but / I am here / alive / I respond to insults. » Read in one go.
Florence Morin-Martel
“What can we do against poeticization? »
If it is interesting to focus on this collection, it is because it is a manifesto of what is intended to be a certain current poetry, a strong tendency to put the minimum of affects in a maximum of lists or repetitions . But this book also marks this other trend towards minimalism whose emptiness should explode in the opposite direction. So these poems: “Do you want company? », “There probably won’t be any snow this year”, “where are my (reading) glasses?” » they testify. The insignificance thus brought to the zero degree of emotional investment undoubtedly reflects an eloquent mirror of the ambient air. 140 times the word “long” on a page registers like an old formalist cliché. But precisely, how can an author as invested in publishing as Mylène Bouchard want to offer emptiness as a mirror? However, she is capable of the best: “the stars never go back / at the limit they turn their backs / unconditional / they fall / from the ceiling / and // hang the Pleiades on your cheek”. In short, to be taken as a collection of love between two beings who don’t have much to say to each other.
Hugues Corriveau
Love to death
There are a thousand ways to bear witness to mourning, but few moments of grace are as powerful as those that permeate Carole Massé’s moving collection. This Diary of a last trip traces the last moments together of Jean-Yves Soucy and the poet, whose step by step towards the disappearance of his companion strikes at the heart. Indeed, “The word [est] a burden / when we have to / hide our pain there. » Now, the author hides nothing, has no modesty in penetrating the burn made of blows of pain, of breaks towards the black. “You were my journey,” she says, no longer knowing if there is a necessary journey left for her, because “the language crumbles / like bread” through silence. The very successful part “State of shock” graphically conveys the dismay. The state of consciousness is here at the most vivid of thought. In one dazzling formula, she says: “Talking bleeds me”! She will succeed in writing her book in the apartment shared for years with her lover, covered in outdated colors, but their own. At the end of the race, after the words, the author moves into a white apartment until the disappearance itself, leaving her, she says, in the image of what remains to her, without paintings and without colors . Devoid.
Hugues Corriveau