Messy phonemes
By Ariane Caron-Lacoste and Jonathan Charette’s own admission, The Beretta Bandtheir new collection of poetry written by four hands, is “weird funny funky dada/crazy not related for a second”. Their project? To tell the stories of touring and the genesis of their musical duo of ballistic punk: “The truth all the truth / nothing but lies / on the formation of the band”. In truth, a fictional group, even if its insolence and its stage irreverence machine-gun the real: “Fred Pellerin is the first part / you wear extra thick earplugs / I sniff glue to forget / his stories of yesteryear”. Carried by a frenetic rhythm, the verses multiply “metaphors on the weather” and the representation of a punk anger. There is sometimes too much noise for nothing, but the proposal, jubilant, amuses a lot. Whether it is anachronistic, carnivalesque, caustic or hammy, humor is omnipresent and offers a growing pleasure, from this scene of bodysurfing in the front row of a show held in a kindergarten with the pernicious drawbacks of handbangingwhich afflicted Chopin during his musical career. A tasty UFO to be released on August 5.
Yannick Marcoux
A crack in everything
What wouldn’t a parent do for their child, we often wonder. Emilie Devoe’s collection, The carved staralso asks this question, but the rhetoric here is much more dramatic, since her daughter, Rose, on the cusp of adolescence, “asks / to die”. In a poem, a list of “What scares you”, the innocuous “spider” rubs shoulders with the simple fact of “wiping knives”, but soon everything is gone and one fear swallows up all the others: “to live”. Emotion is at the surface of the page in this collection of images as simple as they are poignant. On one side, this girl, “a feather / braving the gust” who fights against each day: “even the lichen trembles / under your fairy step / in combat boots”. On the other, this mother, who exhausts her resources to “cover the crash / of the scars” and not fall, too, with the hope that her daughter can get back up: “I align my drifts / so that our continents / stay in their place”. The darkness is plentiful and love, efforts and sacrifices, often in vain, but life is a light, and this collection pursues it, come what may. To be published on August 5.
Yannick Marcoux
Breathe
How to inhabit space, its intimacy? How to know the other, the father, the mother or the brother in the proximity of things, with life inside and the bad weather and the hazards of the days? Collection of “disquiet” (Pessoa), but also of an immanent love for what is close, for what is heard and seen. The questions of the poet Jean-Guy Lachance haunt this murmured work, so calm that the words never jostle, tend to create a journey from oneself to others. [Je] “I go along paths of silence,” he tells us. He arrives in Lisbon, which he “joins[t] [s]a room / [et] deposit [s]on heart in the trunk”. It is precisely “a writing of loss / a writing of almost nothing”, which in itself is considerable, because it opens up all the possibilities of happiness or unhappiness. The poet travels as if to seek himself through tiny peregrinations, as distant as they may be, because they are circumscribed by this anxiety which constrains him: “exhausted, accomplished / I breathe with the earth / bare life”.
Hugues Corriveau
To travel
Following the Russian space program, taking the train to move one’s spleen, looking for the ideal diving suit to protect oneself from misogynistic attacks, this is a bit of the bet of this collection by Mélissa Labonté, between dream and reality. The poet connects with the “barkers without medals”, they who have “terribly chosen / to be alive”. Surpassing oneself too: “I dive to the bottom to the algae grown / a hundred years before my birth / I carry out an analogous mission / as apprentice astronauts imitate the sky”. “I am this woman in space / my movements are observed, calculated”, she adds. Seeking her way as a discoverer, the poet deepens her relevance as a woman in existence. We regret that the author, so precise and so focused on a project, imposes on us a dross such as: “I think back to my favorite pants / forgotten in the cabin of a swimming pool in Iceland”. Dwelling on such petty domestic dramas detracts from the intrinsic quality of his collection.
Hugues Corriveau