Je ne ferai pas de casse-tête de
dauphin, Cherry Blue
Bouc Productions, 2025
Cherry Blue writes from a distance. The distance anxiety creates with a surrounding world that lies outside of any control. The distance that separates one woman from those who seek success and maternity. The distance between a sex worker, her clients, and the alienating atmosphere of the strip club. The distance a person who has created intricate relationships with people who come from a variety of trajectories establishes from her conservative family.
These instances of distance are not due to a lack of understanding or connection. They emerge from the speaker’s awareness of her own situation and an assumed and accepted lack of adherence to expectations. And they might act as a bulwark against the onslaught of small destructions and crimes against humanity Cherry Blue mentions in her poems. They make it possible for the poems to be a response and protect the subjected self. The poems then act as a space away from anxiety, in the eye of its storm rather than at a distance:
only at the strip club am I anxiety-proof, I know I’m protected by homonyms and the search for incantations, the indifference toward customers attenuates the heaviness of social circuses, the dissolved voice no longer counts
je ne suis imperméable à l’angoisse qu’au strip club, je me sais protégée par les homonymes et la quête incantatoire, l’indifférence envers les clients atténue la lourdeur des cirques sociaux, la voix dissoute ne compte plus (37)
Her tone varies as it moves between wonder, indignation, irony, confession (“I don’t just like irony I also like confessions,” she writes; "je n'aime pas que l'ironie j'aime aussi les confessions," 41) and she herself shifts between surrealism and an extreme, tired realism. The book itself allows for variation through the use of pictures (the author also being a photographer), mostly but not solely in black and white. These in turn allow for text to find other forms by being superimposed and forming other motifs, and by being inserted through text boxes that seem to illustrate the pictures. The softness of these pictures, through blur and a form of fogginess, makes the text sharper and incisive even as the words tend toward casualness and everyday speech; the difficulty of holding on to their pictorial components adds to the sense of flow and slow chaos at the heart of the text. And so we read, opposite a full-page picture featuring a nude figure, gentle and long against broken, sharp rock and a jagged horizon: “the rope gains density / the rope creates shapes in space // beauty is a little tiny armchair” (la corde se densifie / la corde crée des formes dans l’espace // la beauté est un tout petit fauteuil, 55)
In its exploration and multi-faceted originality, this collection is held together by desire: a desire for a productive destruction; a desire for a rudimentary form of patience in the face of the compulsion to renounce ourselves and simply give up. The two are inseparable and through them, the whole points us toward a stern form of hope.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
