Madame full of shit, Catherine Paquet
Hurlantes, 2023
As you open Catherine Paquet’s debut collection, knowing that “Madame full of shit” is the French equivalent of “Little Miss Full of Shit” and that it appears within the collection in tandem with “Manic pixie dream girl” will give you two elements that seem essential to its construction. In these poems, the search for balance between self-deprecation and self-awareness is woven through with a criticism of the demands placed on women and the fantasies they resist or create in response.
Throughout the collection, Paquet expresses a
desire for movement, for transformation, for a dynamic future, in part by the
repeated use of the vocabulary of immobilization (“stallé,” “jammé”), partly
through straightforward images like “I look for meaning like a top / at the
risk of falling I spin” (“je cherche du sens comme une toupie / au risque de
tomber je spinne,” 39). This expression is meant to make life possible and
better instead of being an expulsion:
we should start up the
fan
shake up the air along
with the ideas
give ourselves the spaces
of our ambitions
so that the wants that
assail
stay put in a dirtpile
instead of getting
expelled
on a porcelain seat
il faudrait partir la fan
brasser l’air avec les idées
se donner les espaces de nos ambitions
que les envies qui assaillent
se tiennent dans un tas de terre
plutôt que d’être expulsées
sur un siège de porcelaine (90-91)
English speakers with some knowledge of French might find the book somewhat more approachable for its use of Franglais, which the publisher (the percussive Hurlantes Éditrices) defends in a prefatory note. Though this defense continues to be necessary in a context where attitudes toward the French language and its defense remain conservative, the text presents its own defense. It takes up and radicalizes the rhythm of spoken language, allows it to hit, to surprise, to shift ideas suddenly even as the languages flow together. Through very short lines and phrasings, it accelerates the speed of reading and of speaking, it holds a joy that is contagious for the reader.
The collection is organized in three sections, each focusing on loose themes: a youth that is lived as fleeting, and the elements of the body, inner life, and selfhood; placelessness, distress, and what existentialism looks like today; and the imperative to heal and take care of ourselves in ways that disarms the strength of anger and anxiety and their potential for change.
the veterans of
“resilience”
pick up the dead soldiers
in the parks,
battlefields for dignity
between
judgment,
overdoses,
giving up
it’s true that the hand
is invisible that forces
responsibility
down the throats of the
famished
les vétérans de la “résilience”
ramassent les corps morts
dans les parcs,
champs de bataille pour la dignité entre
le jugement,
les
surdoses,
l’abandon
c’est vrai qu’elle est invisible
la main qui enfonce la responsabilité
dans la gorge des affamé·es (87-88)
Paquet’s poems are highly concerned with, full of concern for, everyday life. They transform everyday clichéd expressions into new, fertile images, avoiding our expectations. Bringing water to the mill, amener de l’eau au moulin, adding proof or arguments, becomes “a seduction hydraulic / at the mill” (“séduction hydraulique / au moulin,” 18). A disappointing ending to a story (finir en queue de poisson) gives way to an improbable “fish bottom for an ending” (“cul de poisson comme fin,” 22). And the simple idea that things come in threes (jamais deux sans trois) becomes a comment on loneliness (“never two without a chill,” “jamais deux sans froids,” 25). She also details the insufficiencies of daily life by selecting simple objects that carry weight and exemplify fatigue and the dreading of change, as in the poem on page 50: the corner of the kitchen, neon lights, fingerprints on stainless steel, washcloths and jogging pants, extra-large band t-shirts, love handles, Epsom salts…
Throughout, the relationship to self passes through the relationship to the body and to clothes, and specifically to the expectations that others place on them. Reflecting on weight loss and exercise, she writes: “I think people thought I was prettiest / when I was lose in a storm / frozen mermaid / faults all over my shape” (“je pense qu’on m’a jamais trouvée aussi belle / que désorientée dans une tempête / sirène surgelée / des failles partout sur la shape,” 30). Paquet instead locates beauty in the acts of promising and rebounding:
the path the beautiful
the great one
sketches itself like an
abyss
rock bottoms are fertile
the softness of a warm
pebble
at the end of trembling
fingers
resonates like a prayer
le chemin le beau le grand
se dessine comme une abysse
les rock bottoms sont fertiles
la douceur d’un galet chaud
au bout des doigts tremblants
résonne comme une prière,
80-81
Paquet is able to create tension and awaken desires that keep us engaged. Her writing is clear and inviting, and I wrote down too many passages for me to be able to share them all here. And even as she sometimes cuts herself in the process, her precision and irony are sharp and direct – she makes language at once into a tool and a weapon. And indeed, the strongest poem might just be the one on page 73 (they are all untitled), where she describes the ruinous effect on her fingers of digging in the soil of meaning so that something new may grow.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
