De mauvais augure, Erika Soucy
Triptyque, 2026
A mother tells her son: “you will never be the cause do you hear me // never the cause” (tu ne seras jamais la cause tu m’entends // jamais la cause). Into this statement that makes her sentence explode, she places all the anger she has toward the world, all the knowledge she has of the harm it will bring – a knowledge that’s moved beyond fear, into something worse – and all the love she has for her son. She surrounds him, protects him, steadies him, readies him. There is no moral implication here: cause, cause, and not fault, faute. There will be awful things, but not because of him.
Set early on in Erika Soucy’s collection De mauvais augure (Ominous, or Ill Omens), this line marks a moment when the themes fall into place, just before the topic becomes clear. Getting older, being a single mother, facing great threats from the world, caring for a son who is becoming a teenager – all these experiences are enough to occupy one’s emotions and calendar. But doing so when wars and genocides mean that the world is crumbling and seems to be coming to an end adds a taste of cataclysm to a strained existence that will bring the speaker to accumulate non-perishable food and basic necessities for a time when things do come crashing down. Still, she feels no threat to herself; rather, she fears she may not be able to fulfill her role: “am I useful machine am I / white like lying / am I / worth betting on” (suis-je machine utile suis-je / blanche comme la menterie / suis-je / le cheval payant).
Among the collection’s themes, there’s poverty as well – a lack of hands for the fingers she needs to count money on, the incredible image of a submarine for a life in debt, neither floating nor sinking. In response, on the opposite page, is a Communist Manifesto lived in times of austerity summarized in a single poem:
class struggle
is a pulse
a blood sample
that is bound to me, one
spectre to another
my head in gold
my ass at the bottom of
the barrel
a bowl of water
for austerity
la lutte des classes
est un pouls
une prise de sang
qu’on m’attache d’un spectre à l’autre
la tête dans l’or
le cul dans la dèche
un bol d’eau
pour l’austérité
This poem functions through a hidden structure that’s forced into imbalance: the opposition between health tests and the lack of necessities; the hidden framing between class struggle in general and austerity politics, that new offensive within class struggle; the animalization of the speaker and the short lines interrupted only by a call of the human to be something more than the animal or ghost she is reduced to. The poem, of course, also cuts through these lessenings of the self by affirming its symbolic, critical being.
Soucy has such great talent. Look again at the passages I chose earlier: the repetition of the middle of a line, the surrounding of a question with questions. She wields words, sentences, line breaks, stanzas; she weaves images before our eyes, without letting on what she is putting together until after we’ve moved on to more words. She uses the least number of words possible and makes them say so much more than they could ever have been meant to. Take these lines:
j’ai vu mourir
de grands chanteurs et des coqs
vivre à ma table
I’ve seen the death of
great singers and
roosters
live at my table
The opposition between dying and living, the equal number of syllables between the first and third line, the proximity between “great singers” and “roosters” (a rooster, or coq, being a way to describe someone who is too proud and haughty and loud), the near-haiku quality because of the seven syllables in the middle line, a rhythm that is difficult to maintain, the inversion of infinitives and their subjects, the pushing together of the quasi-subjects with a syntax that treats them differently, the disappearance of the actual subject of the stanza before the image (j’ and ma barely register with the vivacity of the vs, even with the secret parallel between the vs and the ms in the first and third line)... all this tied with the thinnest thread into the smallest knots to hold together a baroque painting.
Rage and hatred cut through so many of the pages, with calculated, willful strokes. The speaker concludes a poem by asserting: “I am better and better at loathing / I spit / with wisdom,” before beginning the next by describing herself as “enraged and able / useful” (je déteste de mieux en mieux / crache / avec sagesse; enragée et capable / utile).
This first section focuses on the speaker’s own relation with capitalism, patriarchy, and war. In the second, she turns to her son and what she leaves him with, what world she leaves him in. Using the imagery of the flood, she casts protection like a net which may just as well miss him as restrain him. Here poverty, or class more precisely, means that there are no lifeboats left and no signs to read (“it was written in the sky / but we are at the bottom of the sea”; c’était écrit dans le ciel / mais nous sommes au fond de l’eau). One poem presents a different future as possible, but as placed beyond hope, beyond the efforts to entrap them while maintaining them just barely afloat:
the door
I swear
leads to the song of the
waves
and to appeasement
shall I burn the arks
keeping us from the flood
or is it with a saw that
I would rather
destroy
swim the seamen are
singing
swim as long as you can
they are speaking
of eating you
the door
would I dare swear
that it leads to better
la porte
je le jure
mène au chant des vagues
et à l’apaisement
fais-je brûler les arches
nous gardant du déluge
ou est-ce avec une scie que je préfère détruire
nage les marins chantent
nage tant que tu le peux ils parlent
de te manger
la porte
oserais-je jurer
qu’elle mène à mieux
See the decisiveness of action set against the undecidability of the cause: do the arks keep them from the flood, or will protection will be brought by destroying them? There is something beautiful and there is calm and peace on the other side of the door – but is that really better than the state of survival?
The book ends with a section of prose poems dealing with that question, titled “Pragmatic Survivalism.” The speaker here – the mother, and Soucy herself – looks at her son through the images of Gazan teenagers, boys killed or forced to kill, girls raped; of Ukrainian teenagers and families; of detainee camps outsourced all over the world; of Canada’s own camps which would be created in the Prairies or in the North. She sees the war machine advancing toward her; she makes her priorities clear: “A teenager’s life is worth more than rare land and freshwater” (Une vie d’adolescent vaut plus que des terres rares et de l’eau douce). She weighs Québec’s proximity to the United States, her vulnerable status as a writer, the need to preserve books, the chance that the books she owns by trans authors might lead to her arrest. She counts the weapons she owns. She names fascists fascists. She explicitly ties their violence to that of a man in her family, to Nazis. She feels the pull of collaboration with the enemy, the desire to attempt saving her family, knowing that “Poetry arrives when life is still tolerable” (La poésie arrive quand la vie est encore tolérable). Yet she also sees her inability to be anything but a writer, who writes the truth, who rebels against inhumanity, who is exposed.
The answer, then, is not to seek peace or appeasement. The speaker tells her son to be neither dove nor crow, and rejects both symbols for behaviour, but to be a child, to be a teenager, and learn to spot the vultures instead. She offers him respite but not calm. In one poem I see the metaphor of violence and destruction like current running through their bodies, her passing on the grounding rod, indicating that they only have so much bite, so much fight in them, and that it’s his turn to speak:
speak I say
I hand you the rod
let go of the outlet
of the current
it’s up to me to hold it
our teeth rot it’s a
family trait
a sign
parle dis-je
je te tends le pieu
lâche la prise
le courant
c’est à moi de le prendre
nos dents pourissent c’est de famille
un signe
In this acting together, we see to what extent De mauvais augure is a book of resistance, a book for the moment being – since there is always a moment, since we ceaselessly find ourselves in moments of destruction and need to continue living in their midst.
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) – all soon to be followed by a fourth! – 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.