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.
