Review of Exit Is A Blade On Which I Throw Myself | Back from the dark

“I want to experience this suffering mixed with joy that I read about in magazines. In the poetry of others. I dream of this so ardent fatigue that makes you mad”, announces Marie-Élaine Guay in the first pages of The exit is a blade that I throw myself onwhich we can imagine written on the edge of the maternity ward.

Dominic Late
The Press

Oppressingly plunged into the vortex of post-natality, this place where paradise can turn into hell in an instant, the first part of this third book (after Castanets and the unforgettable story The notches) unfolds like a long oxymoron and does not shrink from any taboo.

She is thus in the image of this deeply paradoxical experience that is motherhood, in that she constantly opposes the despair of the lack of sleep to the intoxication specific to the presence of these teachers of laughter that are children. “Loving you is the test / of a broken smile / at the fork”, writes Marie-Élaine Guay to her “accomplice of suffering”.

If these poems to the I, certainly universal in scope but rooted in the intimate, bear witness to the pain of a mother who nevertheless had the privilege of being able to heal her distress, the second part turns outward in order to depict a woman “with a blue face / who never wins”.

This courageous mother whom the poet observes embodies all those who will never know the peace of mind of knowing that they are understood, taken by the throat that they are by all these days that they sacrifice to the work of the survival of the others: “what the songs say / is not intended for him / life does not offer him / not even the joy of others”.

A striking kaleidoscope portrait of a motherhood less blissful than that which is rumored, The exit is a blade that I throw myself on speaks both of the enslavements of parenthood and of the magnifying power of the newborn child. Marie-Élaine Guay returns from a darkness whose opacity she did not suspect, having the generosity to open her arms to all those who just don’t know how.

The exit is a blade that I throw myself on

Marie-Elaine Guay

Bush poets

84 pages

7.5/10