Jérôme Melançon : Filles de Gore, by Clémence Dumas-Côté

Filles de Gore, Clémence Dumas-Côté
Les Herbes rouges, 2025

 

 

 

The township of Gore is located in the Laurentides region of Québec. There, in a cabin, in the middle of the night, surrounded by her three children and her partner, as they sleep, a woman – the author, the speaker, the character, the first and third person – has a miscarrage she had been told would happen.

The title of this collection could be translated as “Girls of Gore,” “Girls from Gore,” “Gory Girls,” but I’ll choose “Gore’s Daughters” after the immensely popular and inexplicably untranslated novel Les filles de Caleb. The book is in the cabin and makes its way into the poems through quotations, but it also frames the collection. To interpret the title in this direction supposes not a multiplicity of daughters, as is the case in Arlette Cousture’s novel, but a multiplicity of selves all built around the event that took place in Gore. It also suggests parallels to the novel, where young women seek a way to emancipate themselves from the expectations and domination of a patriarchal society, in part thanks to the recalcitrant humanity of their father, and in part of course against him – all this in a location not unlike Gore.

But Clémence Dumas-Côté’s collection is not a novel: it does not develop characters, nor does it give us clear indications of a plotline – the description of the book does that for us. The poems themselves read as two long poems or as two series of separate short untitled poems. They live within the event, past and possible futures entangled, full of flesh, body fluids, and the life of a child that will not be lived. There is too little for a story: focus is only passing and as attention shifts, it brings with it images of what was just fleetingly experienced. And the heart had already ceased to beat. That story is not told, then, and during the night there is too much for a story to be possible. The senses are too acute, the meaning of objects is too sharp. This loss is also that of the self (“I am no longer someone // many foetal cells have already crossed / the placental barrier / they’ve camouflaged themselves / in the corners of my organs, of my brain” – “Je ne suis plus quelqu’un // plusieurs cellules foetales ont déjà traversé / la paroi placentaire / elles se sont camouflées / dans les recoins de mes organes, de mon cerveau”). There is not enough life, and too much of it.

The speaker struggles with her imagination, now embracing it, now giving in, now pushing it back:

A bedside lamp crackles
sometimes goes out
I
can’t turn it on
I can only imagine it being on 

Une lampe de chevet grésille
parfois s’éteint
je
ne peux pas l’allumer
je ne peux que l’imaginer allumée

Somewhere between feverish dreams and an imagination that protects the self by an overabundance of distraction, we find surreal moments, as when the family’s dog does the dishes, fills out a gratitude journal, takes out the recycling, and formats writing, or when the speaker finds herself in an Ikea store every time the light goes out (a red, menacing light at that). There are also moments that are much too real, as when she quite simply waits for the miscarriage to begin as her children play – or when she can’t decide on which channel to leave the television as she miscarries.

And there are almost-moments, non-existent moments when the child lives:

We agree to meet in a maze
I sometimes follow you closely
at other times I let you get
ahead I only glimpse your hair as it floats
around a corner 

On se donne rendez-vous dans un labyrinthe
je te suis parfois de près
à d’autres moments je te laisse prendre
de l’avance je n’aperçois que tes cheveux qui flottent
au détour d’un embranchement

The main section of the book, titled “Filles de Gore,” takes place this state of suspension, where the event that violates her body cannot take place because it has already taken place. Halfway through, the page numbering shrinks, becomes blurry, then disappears. From there on the pages are not numbered, and just like earlier the poems are not titled; they simply keep coming and end with the devastation of the coexistence of death and life.

The second, shorter section is a longer list poem, with each sentence numbered. Titled “Hauntology Manual” it lists actions that belong as much to sorcery and as little to concrete real-world actions as possible:

8. On the linoleum, choose a flat stone on which to start a fire. In this manner, reanimate the angels that will arise among the brambles in the minutes that follow.

8. Sur le prélart, choisir une pierre plate où partir un feu. Ainsi, ranimer les anges qui surgiront parmi les ronces dans les minutes suivantes.

This collection is not about coping; it offers no catharsis. It is immensely sad and violent, as the tearing away of life can only be. It leaves us with many lives that do continue, neither lessened by loss nor able to fill its void – many lives that continue together.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out 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.

Micheline Maylor : Notes from a Small Publisher: Frontenac House Press

 

 

 

 

Founded in 2000 by Rose and David Scollard, and acquired by Neil Petrunia, and his wife Terry Davies around 2013.  I’ve acted as senior acquisitions editor there since 2013 and recently added the talents of John Wall Barger to the editorial team. We’ve focused mainly on poetry and solely Canadian works since the founding of the press. We look for manuscripts that say something new, while attending to the craftwork of poetry.
          I believe that Canada has its own literary voice distinct from its foundations as a commonwealth of the British Empire, and distinct from our America friends. We must. We have different concerns, values, and culture, distinct from both behemoths that flank us.
          Poetry has trends and schools, as do music, the visual arts, and film. At the moment, as Canada grows into itself, we are immersed in “voices of identity”. This creates gateways into worlds we cannot inhabit ourselves, and, hopefully, increases our capacity for understanding and empathy. It also can underscore our differences and increase tribalism.
          But what I’m most fascinated with is the existential commonality that exists in our humanness, and our common capacity for as Blake says in Auguries of Innocence, “the world in a grain of sand.” And I find myself increasingly drawn to existentialist phenomenology coupled with surreal metaphor. Poems the speak to common emotion and experience through description and experience embodying the commonality of humanness filtered through surprising language and imagery.
          One of our authors, Tyler Engstrom, published his debut collection with us, Think of How Old We Could Get, and I look forward to more from him. His work is mainly written in prose poem, with short scenes of high cinematic images and a punch of emotion. His voice is absolutely unique. I hope to see more from this promising writer in the future. I’d especially like it if some upcoming filmmaker would make some short films of his work. Hint, hint, out there. Here’s his poem “Crying Men” from Think of How Old We Could Get (2021) 

Crying men

I stuck my hand out the window
and made it a plane in the wind as we approached the gas station,
a pock mark on an otherwise naked body to run rubber on.
I walked in and the station attendant asked me,
“Do you believe in God?”
I told him no, or maybe when the moon seems right
and I need something more fitting to a poem than
believing in nothing.
He took me by the hand and we walked out back into the field
behind the station where I imagined someday wild horses had run free
and he asked me again
and I told him only when the wheat we pass through
becomes bread and wine will I believe the word of God
and he took my hand again and kissed me on the mouth.
We both tasted like cigarettes and I said still, no,
but he cried and I don’t do well with crying men.
He said God told him the next man would be beautiful
and tell him what he needed to know.
I told him I was not a beautiful man.
He said yes, but he hoped I might do
so I laid him down and told him,
“There is a hole in your heart no God can fill.”

I came back to the station and you were waiting there
with a soda in your hand and the tank full
and you said, “Who do we pay?” 

“Nobody, we’ve already given so much.”

It started snowing a few minutes later on the road
and you told me my eyes looked like Lake Louise. 

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is the senior acquisitions editor (poetry) at Frontenac House Press. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021) won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). Her latest appearance introduces Hunger: The Poems of Susan Musgrave (Wilfred Laurier Press. 2025).

Mike Bagwell : Four poems

 

 

 

Tomorrow, the Things We Want But In Having, Reject Out of Fear
 

Just like the ocean, we get by
with only the basic information.
We overload on it until our wounds
turn crooked and overlap
like they’ve forgotten
where they were going. 

Today we line up to view
the precise list of things
we cannot have.
Someone picks up a camera.
This is usually the case. 

Instead of cheese, they say
fat chance or my body still manifests
perception by vibration alone.
There is mild applause. 

What looks like a gene is really
the original fetal position.
It would applaud
if it knew how,
but it just waits around
for 3000 years.

  

 

The Graph of Desire

Huffy Henry henried the corner
dripping drool on desk arm,
barely watching. Kolaptō had him
down of course, pulled him
out of the air like a balloon
by its tail, zapped him up
with the lightning. 

Kid Cumulus jumps from his row
in back of Lacan’s lecture hall
where the old master draws
his penis diagrams on the chalkboard,
huge and tumescent. 

The Kid vaults students
in the next row. His classmates—
dull/French—catch and hold him back
like a movie in their heads. 

He spits zippers, reacquaints himself
with palm fronds, opens his bowels
for the music roaring through.
Kid cupholders his ancestors
with answers, cats the rosaries,
wraps his finger with the future
and points it straight back
at the professor. 

All the faces are the same
Henry and Bones, Kolaptō
and Kid, Alberto and Ricardo,
Deleuze and Guattari,
all chanting,
all symbolic chains
folding into the lattice
of Skypenis
that abides above all. 

At the point where desire
is durationless, Kid Cumulus
rains down insults
on the phallus and it works:
new trees grow
from the tile. 

Kid Cumulus hovers
three inches off the ground
for the rest of his natural life.

 

  

Cumulus Ah Um

Kid Cumulus forgets his name
and goes hunting for it
in the forest of proper nouns,
cutting his own trail,
cutting his friends in half
to peer through the telescope
of their intestines
to climb the rungs of their sex
into the dripping moon. 

Meanwhile, I invented
a kind of June music
using only ping pong balls
and melancholy. Been playing
Special Rider Blues for months.
I'm going way out yonder
then back again
like a touch or torch
on the back of my hand.
Well friend, well,
keep on, keep on peeling
my skin
into an orchid
of distance. 

Kid comes back
crowned the king
of nothing.

  

 

What Will Happen

In the river within the river,
I am the air.
The way death helped me
to remember death
by dying.
I am a pure currency
that the mountain knows
how to spend.
Everyone who comes
into my field of vision
dies when they leave it.
Just the other day
for example, I fell in love
with distance,
left the horizon
but my silhouette would stay
there indelibly like no river
before me.

 

 

 

Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and his work appears in Poetry Northwest, Action Spectacle, The Texas Review, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Afternoon Visitor, HAD, Tyger Quarterly, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.