Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, Mayra Bruneau Da Costa
Éditions Mains
Libres, 2025
The title to Mayra Bruneau Da Costa’s second collection, “Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres” might translate as “Map of the apostles with two sugars.” It encapsulates the tone and the topic of the poems: they map out a separation and a series of encounters with men, and that amount of bitterness requires at least some sugar. They lay out men, each adoring in some way, or too eager to follow her, each adopting some position in relation to her body and the distance she has since taken from them. She displays both tenderness and sadness toward them, but also toward herself, bringing balance to the book through a constant teetering.
A deep self-awareness keeps the collection on track. Distance from herself allows her to maintain some distance from us and keep us in the role of readers rather than confidants. I felt a desire to say what isn’t meant to be shared, what’s held back out of decency and respect for her relationships.
The poems are mostly short and brought together tightly in eighty pages. We move through the separation from the father of the speaker’s children to moments of closeness with other men – there may be very few, there may be more, and she prohibits any such questioning by giving only extremely specific details about interactions and bodies, any of which could be amalgamated into two people, and addressing each in the second person singular. There is plausible deniability as to the identity of this you, the number of yous, their specificity, their coexistence – “how could I feel I had lost my way / when each of you / is a room in a house?” (comment me sentir égarée / quand chacun de vous / est une pièce de ma maison?, 27).
Around her separation, Bruneau Da Costa shows the stickiness and messiness of prying apart intertwined lives. Addressing her former partner in the second person like all the others, she places herself in the position of the deer in headlights and of a charging bull’s target. Yet both former partners are immobilized: “I smile when we end up / together in the same room / you seem even more striken than I am / in my straightjacket” (Je souris quand nous nous retrouvons / dans la même pièce / tu sembles encore plus atteint que moi / dans ma camisole de force, 29)
The two main clusters of poems are more or less divided by poems that borrow from ancient and contemporary mythologies. “To each their legends,” she writes. Nirvana, the golden fleece, Ariadne’s thread, Sun Tzu and Wu-Tang, tarot, Narcissus, Cinderella, the Gorgons, the Snow Queen, prayer, all appear for brief images, reigniting our myths. Bruneau Da Costa even mobilizes misunderstood and misappropriated symbols to display the cavalier manner we so often treat meaning, especially those of people(s) we do not take the time to understand but instead turn into our own stories.
Passing
Haven
I hide in the map of
tenderness
Carmen Santiago
to steal shards of you
to mould
an inukshuk a voodoo doll
I will leave with
Havre
éphémère
Je me cache dans la carte du tendre
Carmen Santiago
à voler des éclats de toi
pour mouler
un inukshuk une poupée vaudou
avec laquelle je
repartirai
When she speaks of the men she sleeps with, the speaker makes two fundamental aspects of their encounters clear. They both desire closeness, intimacy, and pleasure, but they each desire entirely different things: “I asked for nothing / you stroke the back of my neck / I make you want to be soft / you don’t quite want me / but are afraid of losing me” (je n’ai rien demandé / tu caresses ma nuque / je t’inspire la douceur / tu ne veux pas tout à fait de moi / mais redoutes de me perdre, 57).
And so it is her who leaves furtively or actively. Simply because there is nothing to keep her around. Likewise, there are no teachings, no lessons in these poems. Perhaps the speaker has difficulty being close to people (and she does recognizes something like that). Perhaps being close to people is difficult more generally, and the characters in the poems are full of character traits that can be read as endearing or infuriating depending on the tone that accompanies the readings.
This ambivalence is present throughout – “I made us into / foul cranberry cakes” (j’ai fait de nous / des gâteaux infects aux canneberges, 30) is as likely to be an adorable attempt or a complete disaster. Likewise, there is both relief and regret in “you were an octopus I was a ghost / and I frenched you like California / even though we were bitter” (t’étais une pieuvre moi un fantôme / pis je te frenchais comme la Californie / même si on était amers, 44), although there is also a tinge of humour since “on était amers” can be read “on était à’ mer” (à la mer), “we were at the sea.”
The first time I read the collection, I had an impression of joy, of freedom, of constant liberation from others accompanied by a kind of expected exasperation. The second time, I saw a profound sadness in the poems. And somewhere Mayra Bruneau Da Costa is shaking her head at me, happy with what she is doing, whatever that really is – stepping away from her character to breathe, finally but only for a moment.
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.
