Marcel Labine and Tania Langlais
Marcel Labinethis important poet, returns in March, with As if it were like that, taking a sharp look at mass killers, whose actions are placed in perspective with the ecological catastrophe. As always with Labine, the collection promises exploratory thought based on erudition placed at the service of essential poetry. Here he will appeal to Quarter Pound from Rabelais, to “the perfumed panther” from Dante. Strong proposition that this enigmatic travels through a fractured reality and a space that flourishes from literature itself. In April will follow Tania Langlaiswho has already offered us wonderful collections, including While Percival fell (Les Herbes rouge, 2020), which earned him the Governor General of Canada Award and the Alain-Grandbois Prize. His new work, The apple trees were everywhere overhanging the fences, is a tribute to Mayakovsky’s love for Lili Brik. At 36, he shot himself in the heart. The poet “takes the supplication, the expression of naked pain”.
As if it were like thatRed Herbs, March 9
The apple trees were everywhere overhanging the fencesRed Herbs, April 5
Akim Gagnon and Samuel Lapierre
For an embodied orality, you must read these collections close to the writing of Marjolaine Beauchamp. Akim Gagnon concocts for us, in April, Two for onebook which brings together the collections Galvaude And The white knight. His poetry evenings are extremely effective, identifying poorly received readings, dismay, wishing to be a parent “in a mini room crash […] / in front [s]we are a child / who recites Prévert / with an / elephant mask”. Samuel Lapierre offers, in March, a first collection, The Lord of Ashes, confusing the video game and the overwhelmed gamer. Thus he is grappling with “the animation of [s]one character / who dies / blazed frankly in gray rocks / immobile”, in his own image. The language is as spit there as in Gagnon, bringing together what is broken in their lives and their existence. It is this force of representation of current events, confronted with the exact way of bearing witness to them, which makes these incursions essential. Poetry is not written here based on beauty, but based on the tormented conscience that supports it.
The Lord of AshesHowling Editors, March 18
Two for oneHowling Editors, April 8
To read all our texts for the 2024 literary season
Roseline Lambert and Charles Ségalane
After a doctorate on “anxiety and light in Norway”, Roseline Lambert devotes his research-creation to anxiety in the Arctic Circle. black ac testifies to this. She invests “broken light”, such a beautiful expression, to surround the black/white, this “fire” of the diffuse atmosphere of a time with contradictory flashes. Into these laminated landscapes comes a dead grandmother, a resistant specter. Added to this are superb photos from the collection at the Pyhälahden valokuvaamomuseo in Lapua, Finland. Each poem is titled with a code of longitude and latitude, as for this first text: “61° 07′ 30.5” N. 21° 30′ 45.5” E.”. This proposal is an adventure, and The duty will undoubtedly come back to it when it is published. From the first to the last dayof Charles Sagalane, imposes a minimalist style, with texts always formally identical, first two verses, then a reference of a single word on a single line. Proverbs, remarks, sensations, these shortcuts attract attention: “you too, in your house, receive half of / everything, everything that lives, the mystery, the works, // the gift”.
Black LakeLa Peuplade, March 13
From the first to the last dayLa Peuplade, April 10
Robert Dion
University researcher’s first collection of poetry Robert Dion, An uncertain land responds to a classic vision of free verse. He engages in a deepening of the meaning of what embodies him. From the outset, he asserts: “There is no land / only promised // On the threshold / time remains standing”, listening to this future, this destiny of the territory where it must be engage. “What to desire if not existence / or flight? » The intelligibility of his incarnation in this world leads him on a path of introspection. In a more poetic mode, the author often achieves very beautiful images. Near “the pond / with ferruginous lions / on the lookout for thirst // The sun swallows / the one who, on the water, / bows”. And in this meditation of oneself in the world, in the link that the poet weaves between nature and thought, between the past and the present, a latent despair smolders. If, in fact, “We are talking about the heart // Which tells us nothing / except insufficiency”, we still need to know how to overcome the strange anxiety of existing. In a verse with tragic overtones, he concludes that “ […] there is no point in having been.”
An uncertain landÉditions du Passage, March 18
Julie Stanton and Eric Roberge
Julie Stanton, the dean of our poets, imposes a great desire to live in her poetry of resistance to time, to the dilution of passions. In The whiteness of the ages, as they say “in the whites of the eyes”, the courage of a woman translates the will of those who face their vitality despite what comes. “Report book”, vibrant, avoiding neither desolation nor determination to pursue the right words, placed at the heart of things, in the tremor of a lively anger “of embers and marble”. This blood irrigation makes its way between “the fury of the first blood / and the flow of appeasement”. Always as relevant, this poetry contains pearls of tenderness. Oxygen roundnessofEric Roberge, promises texts sometimes delving into the world of childhood to bring out poems from which certain images radiate. We will go see this “little dementia’s playroom”, we will go and read with him “inscribed with a child’s knife on the ceiling joists / the Greek and Latin quotations [qui] encourage you to set sail. » Meetings between children and adults so that what is woven between living beings shines.
The whiteness of the agesÉcrits des Forges, April
Oxygen roundnessÉcrits des Forges, March