Jérôme Melançon : Pigeon rouge, by David Galvaude

Pigeon rouge, David Galvaude
Les Éditions de la maison en feu, 2025

 

 

 

Before it was amalgamated together with Aylmer and Gatineau – the latter itself the product of an earlier amalgamation, and the entity that gave its name to the newly formed municipality – Hull formed a quasi-entity with Ottawa. Known in statistics as part of “Ottawa-Hull” and gathering in name only the cities on the north side of the rivière des Outaouais, Hull existed in great part, though not chiefly, through the morning southbound and afternoon northbound movement of commuting and carpooling vehicles on a few bridges. Québécois civil servants would work in Ottawa, and return to sleep and shop in Hull, Gatineau, or Aylmer. Oh, and for a while after the Bytown market bars would close, people would continue partying in the Promenade du Portage bars, often brawling. But then they harmonized the hours, so peace ensued once more (at least that’s the story I’ve heard).

In the middle of these loosely held together urban spaces, there exist organic neighbourhoods – which are currently being destroyed by gentrification and, let’s face it, time and the erosion of any kind of village-like life. “Hull” itself is, was, not so much a city as a cluster of neighbourhoods without a clear downtown area, but a clearly defined bureaucratic centre.

Headless and limbless as it is, Hull is certainly not a character in David Galvaude’s collection Pigeon rouge (Red Pigeon). Instead, he fills it with all sorts of supernatural beings. The matchstick houses from the first years of the city become monsters with doors for mouths, eternally helplessly facing each other. There are butterfly wrecks in Galvaude’s head and ghosts escaping from his ears – these beings exist in a flash, lost, seeking for connection, without clear agency. The night itself is a witch; several witches inhabit Hull, including in the Domaine Fairview, where they resist the paving of streets and the management of land by the National Capital Commission. These, it turns out, have an agenda of their own, and Galvaude and his speaker are happy to assist.

Thus Hull is “materialised insanity.” Galvaude speaks of Dante coming to get him but smokes up with him rather than taking him anywhere… or perhaps turns the city into a disco, “vieux-hull inferno.” He lives in the inescapable shadow of the Terrasses Chaudière (you know, those brown high-rise office towers by the Portage bridge), whose main tower, it turns out, is a deep fryer and a cage for the sun. This insanity is already spreading: his experience of the city goes together with the disaster that is gentrification and mass evictions. Galvaude’s outlook is consistently absurd and silly: “property is theft like seagulls / taking off from the maisonneuve mcdonald’s” (la propriété c’t’un vol de mouette / au-d’ssus du mcdo maisonneuve, 18).

Why “red pigeon” then? Because eventually, Galvaude wakes up as one. Before that, he is born again with each fall. He appears as a wolverine at the Pataterie hulloise, a white tiger who wants to be giant (this, after the giant tiger store was bled dry by the city), a chromatic bear, a moth, a blue peacock, something with teeth – “we’re getting closer but that still ain’t quite it” (on s’rapproche mais c’pas encore tout à fait ça, 30) – a lizard, a crab, a bat (a green bat, une chauve-souris verte, like the tv show La souris verte), and then finally:

c’est ça    qui est ça
I’m a goddamn red pigeon with eclipses for wings
and the entire world is just a big almond
a ticket that should be handed out like a dish that’s best served cold
so that all the police cruisers crash into one another
in a sweet and sour city that soils itself
I’m a goddamn red pigeon
I’ve got a job to do
and I’m making sure that there’s room for everyone. 

that’s it   that’s all
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge avec des ailes d’éclipses
pis le monde entier c’t’une grosse amande
qu’y faudrait servir comme un plat qui s’mange froid
pour que toutes les chars de police s’écrasent les uns contre les autres
dans une ville sweet and sour qui s’oublie
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge
j’ai une job à faire
pis j’m’assure que y’a d’la place pour tout le monde. (34)

Was he transformed by the witches, or did they allow him to be reborn entirely? Throughout this second section, a narrative that is unified through a constant transformation, Galvaude mixes nostalgia and loss with a sense of hope for the future, death with rebirth, pause with briefly beautiful images and exaggerated metaphors.

As still and patient as this metamorphic being may be, the red pigeon favours action in the third section. Here he constantly drops kinds of red berries, which we can guess will first splatter and stain and look like blood, before burrowing in the ground and growing anew:

baneberries at the corner of Kent and Laval, “on spectacular merchants of sleep / who wait for misery to do its work / who dream of sponsored exorcism” (sur les marchands d’sommeil spectaculaires / qui attendent qu’la misère fasse sa job / qui rêvent d’exorcisme commandité, 41);

elderberries behind the Burger King, while “the seagulls look at me go / I see in their eyes / that they’d like to abolish the streets” (les mouettes me checkent aller / j’vois dans leurs yeux / qu’y aimeraient ça supprimer les rues, 44);

lingonberries in the Gatineau Parc, falling out of his full mouth, taking the place of the imported cherry trees;

bittersweet nightshade on new cars and expensive houses, “hoping it’ll poison the comfort / in indifference / hoping it’ll awaken the pitch / in the tar / all while drumming with my wings the magic words / everything is free” (en espérant qu’ça empoisonne le confort / dans l’indifférence / en espérant qu’ça réveille la poix / dans l’goudron / tout ça en dodeldirant les mots magiques / tout est gratuit, 48);

and serviceberries around the Lac des Fées, “to quench their thirst” in reference to Denise Boucher’s feminist play The Fairies are Thirsty.

He also pecks at a statue of the Queen, and poops on other statues. With these seeds planted, he continues worrying about everyone having enough to get by, settles in and watches the witches’ work coming to fruition.

Pigeon rouge is a new myth, one that draws from the past and collapses time to use it to destroy the present. One destruction replaces another, bringing hope instead of ruin, as Galvaude seeks “to actively refuse the spectacle of disintegration / by crashing the chasse-galerie / right into the canadien museum of history” (refuser activement le spectacle de la désintégration / en faisant crasher la chasse-galerie / direct dans l’musée canadien de l’histoire, 47). As the witches’ incantation rise, a barn burns, a shadow spans over everything – and the birds take over.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth chapbook, avoice be heard, is now out with above/ground press, alongside the previous three: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020). His most recent collections are Prairial·es and En d’sous d’la langue, both with Prise de parole. Let us not forget 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.

Jérôme Melançon : De mauvais augure, by Erika Soucy

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.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, by Mayra Bruneau Da Costa

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.

Jérôme Melançon : …more songs the radio won’t play…, by Stan Rogal

…more songs the radio won’t play…, Stan Rogal
ECW Press, 2025

 

 

 

Stan Rogal is very serious about not being serious – even when interviewing deceased poets who briefly return to this plane to mess with him. Sitting down with his latest collection, …more songs the radio won’t play…, I didn’t know what not to expect, and it turns out I wasn’t wrong. The concept behind the collection is simple: take a song, use the song title as title, mention the singer or group’s name, and use the lyrics, or any aspect of the song, really, and transform it into something that is more than the song and more than a poem. Let’s get the verdict out of the way: most of the resulting poems function on their own, without knowledge of the original; the other ones will send you running to the song; and all will heighten your appreciation of the song and by your capacity to relate back to it.

But there’s no formula here. Not one way for Rogal to depart from the song, to remix it, to weave himself in and out of it. The book lets itself be read like a song, but it also begs to be studied, for the reader to read it like a musician would listen to a song so they could figure out the parts by ear, find allusions to other songs, understand the texture, and hit those notes.

I won’t give it the satisfaction.

I won’t! I won’t dissect “Shock the Monkey” and compare it to the song even though it’s much shorter than most other poems and I’m more familiar with it. I won’t, even though Rogal is dangling Wittgenstein explicitly on four separate occasions. The Wittgenstein who’s given up on order and sees everything as a game, is impressed by the games, and kind of wants people to come up with more, better games. The book wants its academic article, subtitled “Reading popular music through Rogal through Wittgenstein,” titled with a witty popular cultural reference.

Because that’s also what happens to the title of the collection, a deformation of Kathleen Edwards’ “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” The first trick is to make the allusive (won’t like) into the descriptive (won’t play), all the while adding to the original titular irony by attaching it to poems which, of course, the radio won’t play, seeing as they are poems. The second is to get rid of the capitals in the title so it’s 2020s poetry (in spite of the poems having titles). And then Rogal makes it seem like the title is part of a larger text by adding in ellipses. AND THEN the cover makes us believe there’s nostalgia in this collection by setting up cassette tapes in an artful tableau. The tape is even let out of one cassette (and an old cassette, not the late 90s type!), in a shape that evokes eyeglasses on a string or a baby carriage. More feigned nostalgia: side B is almost done playing. It’s almost time to flip the cassette and start over. Old life returns to new life.

I don’t know Rogal’s age but I can see there’s at least a decade between us just by the choice of songs. Again, there’s no nostalgia in the poems: there are newer songs in there, and the songs from the 1970s and 80s are very much alive, present as they are in their corresponding poems. They’ve stayed with Rogal, he didn’t stay behind with them (and isn’t that the dream for someone whose musical taste belongs to a past era, I was thinking, a Smashing Pumpkins song stuck in my head). He isn’t afraid to spend time with Duran Duran or A Flock of Seagulls and reminds us there are several reasons why their songs were so popular. But I’m NOT going to analyze these poems’ relationships to the original in depth. You figure it out.

Because after all, these are poems. Look at this, in “Hungry like the Wolf”: “Here exists the condition of besidedness / A grammatical sense of adjacency / Do do do do do do do dodo dododo dodo.” Rogal floats an idea, throws us into the song, messes up the meditation, takes us away from the proximity the poem was going to create. Instead, we are pulled behind the scenes of a music video. The dododo line reappears and we are clotheslined, thrown down into an exploration of fascination. Simon Le Bon might be comparing himself to a wolf; Rogal instead subsumes the pop star and the animal under a common concept (take that, Wittgenstein), as mysterious and beautiful but not alike in the least, but nonetheless comparable – the birth of symbolism. And then we get back to the poem’s chorus, with the explicit naming of red riding hood which the footnote informs us was the claimed inspiration for the lyrics; we get back to the singing.

Because yes, these poems have choruses. Things happen in poems when lines repeat, poets have used this device sparingly or quite formally. There’s a modulation, a return, renewed meaning, emphasis. But poems don’t have choruses like songs do, do they? Have you found yourself raising the intensity of your reading in a poem because shifts in its atmosphere led you to understand that a change was coming? Speaking along enthusiastically with the repeating stanza? Reciting part of the poem in your head all day? What’s the poetic equivalent of turning up the volume and tapping your feet while singing your head off? Rogal gives us the chance to give it a shot, to move along with the poems to be moved more than metaphorically.

But also he doesn’t, not always at least, but that’s also on purpose. “I Ran (So Far Away)” appears twice in a row: first as a poem in free verse, then as a prose poem that mixes reviews of the song with descriptions and impressions. In the first iteration, the dynamic from “Hungry like the Wolf” is reversed, we find ourselves on the other side of fascination when the speaker (oomph) says he can’t get away. There’s an end of the world feel to this poem, with nuclear obliteration diction and a knowingly misplaced focus on linguistics. There’s such beauty here, like in these lines: “looking back over your atomic shoulder / you play a beam of alabaster across your face / give me your hand, try to find some surface of yourself / that doesn’t impose too much upon / too late, too late.” How’s this for fascination and desire at the end of the world?

The second iteration of “I Ran” takes a step back and shows us what creates this fascination. Chord progressions, guitar techniques, technical observations, descriptions, songs it references. It all seems helpful and correct, but also extraneous, and through this cascade of details and quotations and additions we get the simple pleasure of enjoying a song, perhaps in spite of all we can know about it and what makes it just another pop song (but isn’t that also the essence of everyday pleasures?).

Wait.

I didn’t do this on purpose. The pulling back, pushing back in… There’s a pattern in these poems. I discovered it while writing. I picked the poems because the songs made sense together for me. I can’t help it. And I’m not even done! Check this out: both poems (this one and the Duran Duran one) share a line: “are you a wind instrument, are you breath?” Who says it to whom? The fascinated, or the fascinating? Isn’t this the essence of fascination, the presence of something beyond the corporeal? And of our relation to singers, given the life they breathe into us? I had to look it up, since it’s so striking. Should I tell you where it’s from? Where Rogal found it? Fine – a 2017 poem by Meredith Striker in the chapbook anemochore. But it’s not the first time he’s brought it up in a poem, so it’s also self-referential. Or is it parallel? Online journal publications are much faster than book releases.

There are other more explanatory poems, more references beyond the songs, more replacement of meaning. Take “Sweet Emotion”: a mention of class consciousness and then “It’s so serious today, the party’s over, or haven’t you heard? / We’re bleeding out, & while you deliberate, bodies accumulate.” (A Perfect Circle, really?) With an injection of Marxism and existentialism (no really, check it out). Take the rewriting of “Radio Ethiopia / Abyssinia” by Patti Smith or “Mama He’s Crazy” by the Judds where Rogal makes new poems and explores what analysis can’t do.

These poems are smart, clever, and they laugh at that part of themselves. They’re fun. They push the poetic experience into the extremely familiar. They attest to the life and staying power of other people’s words and songs, to everything we receive from our mediated relationships with others. And they push the poetic forms by destroying the single line of thought and making the presence of the past known and deeply felt.

So yeah, this is good stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Il n’y aura pas de safety word, by Dominique Hétu

Il n’y aura pas de safety word, Dominique Hétu
Hurlantes, 2025

 

 

 

Dominique Hétu’s collection Il n’y aura pas de safety word (“There will be no safety word”) begins with a section titled “Nommer” (“Naming”), and so I shall also name its topic up front: fatphobia, fat-shaming, fat existence. Its poems are neither round nor angular – which is worth stating, since the collection ends with: “and then / if someone / wants to be clever / wants to be cute // and says (to me) that / I made poems / that are so full // I’m gonna break something” (“pis là / si une personne / veut faire sa fraîche / veut faire sa cute // et (me) dit que / j’ai fait des poèmes / tout en rondeur // j’casse toute”).

In this collection Hétu uses confessional poetry to express what is not allowed to be said publicly, to give it shape, to let others hear what they tell her. She responds to social discourse as well as to very specific encounters. Her humour is biting; it does not facilitate exchanges and does not defer to the power of shaming. She takes a position that complicates feminism and the demands to be proud of oneself. By bringing forward, in verse, her internal monologue, she allows the internal and everything that is internalized to pierce through to the external, to the behaviour that is imposed on her, to work against it. More than self-affirmation, then, these are poems of self-reconstruction – not in the sense that is expected of body sculpting through various (paid for) technologies, but against the constant damages that come from intimate and social interactions: “clothes tagged x / mark of the fault / of error // we know it / it’s whatever / but still it’s violent” (vêtements taggés x / marque de la faute / de l’erreur // on le sait / que c’est n’importe quoi / mais reste que c’est violent,” 70).

Part of her approach is to dare us to be as forward about fatphobia as she is, to acknowledge its presence within us. One of the sections in the book is titled “Du vent,” or “Hot air” as in, “ce n’est que du vent,” “this is nothing but hot air.” Hétu targets the false niceties, the empty encouragements, the backhanded compliments, the hypocrisy of interactions around fatness. In the process, she leads an anti-meditation on beauty, focusing on the dynamics of expectation and imposition, focusing intensely on events, words, letting them repeat and showing them for what they already are and displaying everything they already contain, rather than letting go of them or deepening them. Take this poem, for instance:

for the moment
we’ll admit
that you have the adequate outline
of beauty somewhere 

traces
clues
we see them
under your soft
under the full flesh 

be happy 

pour l’instant
on va reconnaître
que t’as le contour adéquat
du beau quelque part 

des traces
des indices
on les voit
sous ton mou
sous la chair pleine 

sois contente (44)

Hétu keeps her focus on pointing out the violence of forced compliments, pointing out what people are saying and doing when they are praising a picture, an outfit, in which she does not recognize herself. 

She lets us see the amount of energy that is needed to resist the behaviour that is expected of her, notably with a giant break on the page between the two following stanzas: “christ are we ever obliging / we consent to everything / free for all // we / when I / cost too much courage” (“on est serviable en crisse / on consent à toute / free for all // on / quand je / coûte trop en courage,” 82). As in many other passages, Hétu plays on the strength of the “on”: at once they and we, someone and everyone, it is a force that is as much internal as external, making resistance a transcendent necessity, all the more difficult for the lack of external supports. Here then I translate “on” as we, to show the presence of undefined others in the self, the agency they have within the self, but especially the depersonalization of the self, its loss in an undefined group as she acts, something this passage in particular addresses through the loss of the je in the on, looking at herself in the third person instead of acting in the first.

Perhaps in order to gain some ground on the self, it is in great part through exploring an intimate relationship that was lacking in respect, in fact devoid of it, that Hétu develops a voice and gaze that talks and looks back: 

I carry on my somber shoulders
the burden winds that ensure
your kind love
conditional
like a chorus
never fitting 

flayed
I dance
you feel like lip sync
in spite of the heat
and the asthma that keeps me weak
that hinders all rest 

bitter and constant noises
all around
that always take
that spoil the tune 

I will not be your karaoke

je porte sur mes épaules sombres
les vents fardeaux qui assurent
ton amour gentil
conditionnel
comme un refrain
jamais raccord 

au vif
je danse
tu as le goût du lip sync
malgré la chaleur
et l’asthme qui me garde faible
qui empêche tout repos 

bruits amers et constants
autour
qui prennent toujours
qui gâchent la toune 

je ne serai pas ton karaoké (40)

Poetically speaking, the collection functions so well because of its straightforwardness, its plays on silence and quick turnarounds, and the explicit avoidance of rimes, of things being neatly put together, since for her they are not neatly put together, or placed in a manner that is accessible. Still, Hétu ends on the possibility that poetry might open onto other subjects – other topics and selves – and help her reconcile with uncertainty. Without hoping for this poem, for this poetry, she desires it, and goes a long way to bringing it to the page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Jérôme Melançon : je me réclame du vertige, by Geneviève Dufour

je me réclame du vertige, Geneviève Dufour
Hashtag, 2023

 

 

 

In her debut collection, je me réclame du vertige (“I am of vertigo”), the Québec City poet Geneviève Dufour sings the ill body with a loving, sad ballad. The collection is tight, long enough to allow for echoes and a sense of progression, and wound together in a way that maintains focus. By placing the poems at the bottom of the page, she lets thoughts gather and allows the words to fall rather than raise them up. The effort of writing, of moving even, though clearly present, is not immediately perceived. It is after a second and third reading – which the length of the book makes possible – that a fuller meaning begins to show itself across the poems and that the full force of the collection gathers.

Dufour describes vertigo, pain, exhaustion, but also slowness and hesitation, as well as the hard-gained awareness that their absence, just like the decision to willfully ignore them, is a matter of moments that will often come with their return as a consequence. The ill body here is being before it exists, it shapes her capacities: (“molle et malléable / j’ai été sculptée / résiliente,” 41). It also connects the speaker uneasily to her mother, who plays the double role of caregiver and caring person who must be reassured.

We can see a certain arc in her descriptions, a worsening of a condition where neither hope nor despair are permitted, even over a few pages:

“often I walk so slowly / that summer steps over me” (“souvent je marche si lentement / que l’été m’enjambe,” 14)

“I’ve forgotten / the colour of fire / my bubble wrap room / pops / with each movement” (“j’ai oublié / la couleur du feu / ma chambre papier bulle / éclate / à chaque mouvement,” 23)

“I’m being lugged around in a wheelchair / I’m parked at the red light / ants climb up on me / I welcome them I say / hello” (“on me trimballe en fauteuil roulant / je suis stationnée au feu rouge / les fourmis me grimpent dessus / je les accueille je leur dis / bonjour,” 36)

and again: 

“the future just like ping pong balls / that flee under the table” (“le futur pareil aux balles de ping-pong / qui s’enfuient sous la table,” 73)

“I’ll never be able / to visit the Moon” (“je ne pourrai jamais / visiter la Lune,” 77)

The most striking aspect of this book is Dufour’s ability to move through images and metaphors, from the hyperreal to the surreal. Pain is notably difficult to describe and, while we can communicate many aspects of our symbolic and emotional lives – as she does consistently well – pain itself remains outside the range of even the most. The play on reality then serves as much to unanchor the reader from their own corporeality as to pull them toward the existential weight of illness: 

“to run in a three-piece suit / between two walls of glass” (“courir en veston-cravate / entre deux murs de verre,” 22)

“in the basement lay the ashes / of me at seven years old / they are children who grow up / in wet sand” (“au sous-sol reposent les cendres / de mes septs ans / elles sont des enfants qui grandissent / dans le sable mouillé,” 41) 

“my head on sale / on a grocery store shelf / that’s what frightens me” (“ma tête à rabais / sur une tablette d’épicerie / voilà ce qui m’effraie,” 57)

“airplane hearts in the esophagus / I wonder how I could reach / the plants that inhabit me” (“coeurs d’avion dans l’oesophage / j’ignore comment atteindre / les planètes qui m’habitent,” 78)

Dufour accompanies such stylistic liberties with a warning to poets: “I condemn the use of vertigo / as a figure of speech / mine is not dreamy / it identifies itself neurological and central / it soils the everyday my character / in a cadence of dashes lost / identity” (“je condamne l’utilisation du vertige / comme figure de style / le mien n’est pas rêveur / il s’identifie neurologique et central / macule le quotidien mon caractère / en traits cadencés identité / perdue,” 13).

Of course, the writer is never entirely her speaker. Yet the relationship to her own body, as shifting as it is, remains at the centre of the poetics; we feel a non-fictive presence. Dufour often has recourse to a change in setting of her experiences, placing everyday pains and encumbrances into the world and interacting with it at a different genre of distance:

“my armour crumbles / on the side of the street”

“I am a bicycle wheel / a hallway-woman / a tire pushed by a child”

“I am many / my cheek dotted with swallows / shards of vertigos disperses / on baseball fields”

“I am the streetlight / that goes out / when we walk underneath” 

“mon armure s’émiette / en bordure de la rue” (32)

“je suis une roue de bicyclette / une femme-corridor / un pneu poussé par un enfant” (37)

“je suis nombreuse / ma joue parsemée d’hirondelles / éclats de vertiges dispersés / sur les terrains de baseball” (46)

“je suis le lampadaire / qui s’éteint / quand on passe en dessous” (61)

Yet these are as many ways of bringing the world into the body, of tugging at the interplay of body and world and making a bit more room for the self to find some room and balance.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Jacky, by Virginie Beauregard D.

Jacky, Virginie Beauregard D.
L’Oie de Cravan, 2025

 

 

 

As I found myself fanboying among a small crowd of friends and readers late at night in the Port de tête bookstore on the Plateau during The Montreal International Poetry Festival – living a bit of a fantasy for a French-speaking poet living in Regina – between other readings by other poets whose names I’d also held dear for many years, I almost cried during Virginie Beauregard D.’s reading of Jacky. I told her at the break; I already knew I’d need to spend time with the collection. And I did, and the same parts of me unravelled at the same place. I’ll keep that one to myself, if only to see whether other readers might have similar experiences elsewhere.

The four poems that make up this small book drip and flow lightly through the pages. They share a calm tenderness, expressions of love and care for others and from others. They convey a full-bodied but bearable tiredness, a slight sadness that knows the inevitably of what must pass.

Each of the poems is a chronicle of intimacy. Small gestures, furtive thoughts, partial touches nourished by previous touches. Yet this intimacy maintains a mystery. The titles, poems in themselves, help build it: “The smallest closed room that’s ever been seen” (La plus petite pièce fermée que l’on ait jamais vue), “The sun always rises in the middle of the show” (Le soleil se lève toujours au milieu du spectacle), and a simple apostrophe. The book is small, almost square, the words printed in a red so dark it is almost purple, the ink blurring very slightly on the edges without sacrificing precision – a thing of beauty:

my tears
flow back up the cracks in the floor
to my eyes’ shores 

waves crash
on our piece of land
our stolen paddle

Water appears after this passage, and periodically, as if to preserve, to heal and keep calm, often failing to fulfill its promises but losing nothing of its attraction. Things, places, body parts are burning or burning up. Night enters through a light well, light pierces through materials and is confused – perhaps – for love. So much is broken:

I look for nature
but here there’s only
the city’s fractured windowpane 

where the snow is just so tired

Yet I can’t help but find the collection hopeful. Perhaps it’s because of my memory of a voice that had known but did not carry despair. But perhaps it’s that the movement of return and the undercurrents of love that hold the poems together also bring their tone upward, not toward a resolution, but to a continuation.

 

 

 

 

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