Deinstitutionalized
Amy Berkowitz has long been kept silent. So in a “super prestigious creative writing program in a really cold city” where a professor assaulted female students with complete impunity, Amy Berkowitz was not well: “how can anyone be well / while the institution where where we study, where we work, where we live let a man / sexually assault female students for decades / while everyone else is doing / as if everything is normal? » deep poems is the charge of this long suppressed cry by which she claims her sovereignty and her right to speak, attacking “the dominant patriarchal university culture” and this ordinary sexism which relegates the aspiration of women to the status of “tasteless and superficial whims”. In a language without embellishment, Amy Berkowitz goes beyond simple resentment and recovers her freedom, joining this sorority which allows her to do “honor to [s]has voice / honor to [s]is angry”.
Yannick Marcoux
deep poems
★★★1/2
Almy Berkowitz, translated by Daphnée B. and Marie Frankland, Noroît, Montreal, 2023, 92 pages
Front darts
As in a basket of crabs, the second collection of Émilie Pedneault, Crab, is crossed by conflicts. Engaged on roads full of stories, the poet seeks to clear the horizon, but the territory belongs to men and slips under her step: “I walk a place / where killing remains / a way of life”. A long line of women precede her who have not been able to find what she is looking for: “skin soaked with a gender / mom said / nothing will be easy”. Mother in turn, she wants to unpin this strength contained within her and bring down these “Manic” who harness her power. Armed with words, she engages in the fight against this contempt which has made silence reign: “Grandma, you know / I come from all the women / we will take turns / in our silence”. Émilie Pedneault’s quest, when it does not fall into the prescription, thunders with a crash. Lit by the torch of her ancestors, she pushes the road, even if it means setting fire to what resists her.
Yannick Marcoux
Crab
★★★
Émilie Pedneault, The house on fire, Montreal, 2023, 67 pages
See the bird pass
The Writings of the Forges welcome in their pages a great poet. what clothes bare proves beyond any doubt the interiority of this humble poetic thought before the living. Admirably accompanied by graphic works by the Corsican painter, engraver and lithographer Bernard Filippi, the collection then doubles its effect of textual beauty with that of plastic beauty. “Poet-diver”, he knows how to look at “the rethought body” with a tone of wisdom that places him at a distance in the face of misfortune since his “poem is a repainting / of [s]blindness”. From the moment when the poet tackles simple things, a radiance of an always underlying happiness rises within him: “Smell the bay leaf / And its aroma of rain // A melancholy / Of which nothing can [l]’extirpate’. Thus he follows the convolutions of the birds which offer him the thought of a precarious freedom: “If the kite disappears / It is not that it dies / It sails in a vast sky / That the [s]nothing”. Close to the murmur, to a calming of the word, the poetry develops richly in this instantaneousness of a fragile happiness.
Hugues Corriveau
What clothes bare
★★★★
Guy Cloutier, graphic accompaniments by Bernard Filippi, Writings from the Forges, Trois-Rivières, 2023, 80 pages
The dead mother
One thing is certain, in this intense first collection, Camille Lapierre–Saint-Michel proves that she has a very free idea of what poetry should be. She disregards convention and offers both excerpts from the childhood notebook written for her by the mother who is dying, who is dead, letters that the poet will write to her years later, long excerpts in prose, free verse poems. The accents of truth of these different interventions in the face of the inevitable touch on the essential. This way of proposing the poetic disconcerts, because we don’t really know if what is in the newspaper takes up the challenge of accessing what we conceive of as poetry. But we say to ourselves, moreover, that there is not the question if the manner summons us. Long tribute to what the mother can represent for us. Thus she admits: “And now I am starting to die of fear of forgetting us. Because, if the thing happened, this plea would take on its full meaning: “I believe / that I will / succeed in being / happy / without you / Forgive me”. This collection is not reserved for those who know the loss, but is open to those who assume what it will be, or to those who want to know.
Hugues Corriveau
When the sky turns red
★★★1/2
Camille Lapierre-St-Michel, Poet of the bush, Montreal, 2023, 80 pages