And if the bot undressed?
In an era of big questions about the use of artificial intelligence, the idea of using a conversational robot in a literary context can only be intriguing. Especially when it comes to desire, a word that is not often used alongside “robot”. In I watch porn when I’m sad, we discover a machine whose sensuality timidly reveals itself as the author feeds it with her libidinous words. Divided into three parts – Reborn, Healing and Enjoying – Sayaka Araniva-Yanez’s first collection is both dripping and reserved, erotic and modest. It was while having fun interacting with an artificial intelligence playing “psychotherapist”, testing its sensitivity using seductive formulas, that the poet developed her idea. Result: a captivating lyrical dialogue between “You” and “The machine”, which often borrows from religious and sacred vocabulary. An original and polished proposal that will please both purists and lovers of contemporary poetry.
I watch porn when I’m sad
Triptych
108 pages
The right words to remember
Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was only 15 years old when she survived the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Thirty years later, while the young witnesses of this tragedy are at the heart of their adult lives, she calls in Overturn misfortune to a sovereign word, a reappropriation of this story too often explained by others rather than by its survivors. “Our hearts within us will burn / Until our story / Is told by us,” she writes, establishing her clear desire to fight revisionism and hate speech. We particularly appreciate the rhythm of this work, which flows naturally and which we would like to hear read by its creator. In a rich and precise language, the Franco-Rwandan author lets the duty of memory, the present moment and hope coexist in this jewel of beauty. A magnificent story about healing, which the author says she wrote for “the children of the day after” and in which she draws, one good word at a time, a decolonized imagination. “From breath to breath / From end to end / Where are we going? »
Overturn misfortune
Inkwell memory
128 pages
From one pole to the other
An anthropologist in addition to being a poet, Roseline Lambert seems to draw from her field experience in Black Lake, a collection which focuses on changing light, climate, fjords and rivers, but also on transmission and memory. A literary gem full of emotion, the text is punctuated by exchanges with the specter of his grandmother who is reflected in the waves: “She blows the rumor of the lake / How to evaporate the iodine from my heart / spin the smoked dough which entangles my head. This book with Nordic accents is constructed like a map, each poem baptized with geographical coordinates. Roseline Lambert’s colorful pen has a little taste of adventure. She explores “broken light” and the contrasting atmospheres that nature offers us. The magnificent photographs from the collection of the Pyhälahden valokuvaamomuseo in Lapua, Finland, perfectly accompany the author’s words, facilitating our immersion into her world. “I unload for my scream / In all the black lakes of the world”: from Finland to Montenegro, the author deposits pieces of her history in the waters which bathe her, for the greatest pleasure of those who fish for them.
In bookstores March 13
Black Lake
The People
144 pages
The banality of the existential quest
“I was born in a sheet/Then I die in the same sheet/It’s always like that,” writes Jean-Christophe Réhel. It is with simplicity that he approaches in Taurus Taurus loneliness and existential questions, as one would spontaneously confide one’s anxieties to a diary. Confused, the collection seeks its rhythm. Although it contains beads, it sometimes gives the impression of being an assembly of scraps. “The sun cannot last / No more than a smile or a pint of milk.” The images that the author constructs are simple, introspective, and his verses are tinged with doubt. It is sometimes difficult to detect the meaning of the text, and to extract the emotion from it. It is only towards its last pages, when the author uses freer prose, that the meaning of Taurus Taurus reveals. The literary talent of Jean-Christophe Réhel is eminent, but does not seem to reach its potential in succinct forms.
Taurus Taurus
Del Busso
80 pages