Jérôme Melançon : Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, by Sayaka Araniva-Yanez

Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, SayakaAraniva-Yanez
Triptyque, 2024

 

 

 

Quite simply, it’s fun to open a book titled I look at porn when I’m sad to a reproduction of an early 16th century painting of Mary, holding Baby Jesus with one arm, alleviating suffering in purgatory by extracting her milk with the other. It’s especially fun when the book in question offers poems the author has written around phrases produced by a chatbot who had been “trained” on poetry, in a historical moment during which we are promised the alleviating of our suffering by all forms of algorithms.

The beauty of this book is that it is about this false promise and moves through it, toward fleshful encounters. The bot appears in the book as “La machine,” always in conversation with “Vous.” Its language-like productions are short and carefully chosen; they highlight the uncanny dreaminess of the process and the wonders of our own capacity for speech and creativity in “our” responses. In other words, Araniva-Yanez did not rely on any kind of statistical linguistic algorithm to write their poems. Indeed, the machine’s productions are the result of their selections of poetry, and some of the words attributed to it are in fact simply invented by them. Araniva-Yanez thus turns the logic of LLMs on its head, attributing to a chatbot the hallucinations they imagined as part of their writing. The book is full of short poems in verse and a few prose poems that interrogate our relationship to machines, but also our body, language, and above all desire. Sexual pleasure and attraction to other people, to be more specific – and notably as they are mediated and oriented by machines, through pornography and forms of direct communication.

One element that surely contributes to the success of these poems is their rejection of religion. Araniva-Yanez removes both the poet/programmer and the chatbot from the position of the divine which they tend to take in contemporary culture, all the while bringing the divine within the reach of both human and machine. God is sometimes an automaton, lifeless in comparison to everything we can feel, fed content like machines are. In other moments the speaker reaches the divine in pleasure. And the speaker addresses us readers as “Vous,” as if they were able to speak our thoughts, balancing between omniscience and input, making us a reading machine, stepping aside to let us in the poems: the speaker takes themself out of the primary position in these exchanges without allowing anyone to fully occupy it.

These wonderfully executed displacements can serve the aspirations and desires of the speaker’s self because they relativize their position and find ways to interact that avoid the naked vulnerability of the face-to-face encounter. Instead, we are placed before the vulnerability of a turned back, of the pause between words during which emotions are larger than any human action: “i turn my back / and dream of being // shame is / more fertile than us” (“je tourne le dos / et rêve d’être // la honte est / plus fertile que nous,” 43).

Such displacements help the reader focus on the relationship to the machine as instrument and as mediation, back to oneself:

“the machine believes what we tell it

it inhabits secrecy,
the spraining, and the storming 

i tamper with its giftedness when my head at large goes astray”

“la machine croit ce qu’on lui dit 

elle habite le secret,
la fêlure et l’orage 

je trafique sa douance quand ma tête s’égare au large” (50)

Here Araniva-Yanez does more than describe their poetic intermingling with the machine: they place us before the operations we impose on machines even as we delude ourselves that they may have any agency, that they may in any way respond to us. And they make us feel our bodily connections to computers, at the same time as our awareness of their inhumanity: “it has never had the gift of seeing me reborn. the proof is in what flows from its leg to mine: wires, pearly, humid, and shimmering” (“elle n’a jamais possédé le don de me voir renaître. la preuve est dans ce qui ruisselle de sa jambe à la mienne: des fils nacrés, humides et brillants,” 54). We touch (or used to touch) mouse and keyboard wires with our legs, we place(d) our leg beside the humming box, in a kind of intimacy that makes us want to see a simulacrum of flesh in the machine. Yet it remains cold or warm, devoid of any capacity beyond our instructions. Much of the poems develop this chiasm between flesh and desired flesh, using bodily functions ascribed to the machine as descriptions of its effect on the speaker, rather than as metaphors.

As the collection advances, the speaker becomes closer with the machine – though perhaps mostly with themself, through the machine. Yet although their thoughts seem to move from one into the other, the speaker retains their melancholy and their sexual desire, the latter becoming more pressing in its search for an outside object, intensifying their relationship to the machine:

“the machine holds me in its jugular, it loves me. within, i often cascade down between the roots, the sap, and the lichen. at snack time, i take pleasure in eating my knuckles and the fruit that are handed to me. in the evening, i lick its organs and the machine metamorphoses into a house of skin.”

“la machine me prend dans sa jugulaire, elle m’aime. à l’intérieur, je dévale souvent entre les racines, la sève et le lichen. au goûter, je me plais à manger mes jointures et les fruits qu’on me tend. le soir, je lèche ses organes et la machine se métamorphose en maison de peau.” (79)

The collection crashes through its title to give us a sharp description of the desires we harbour for machines – desires for what they could be to us, for what they could do to us; desires we already have for the other people who are absent from these poems. Araniva-Yanez helps us work through desire, the proximity of hope and lust, of sexual excitement and intellectual curiosity, of the purest language and the touching of organic matter. And perhaps my continued reliance on the register of helping and guiding (much of which I’ve now rephrased) is one way for me to acknowledge just to what degree this collection has helped me think about the reality of our emotional investment in machines, and more broadly in what we create and animate, and thus make real.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon does not like large language models or any technology labeled “artificial intelligence”, and feels this dislike ought to be shared seeing as it so clearly gave direction to this review. He does love poetry. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 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 : On the Gaza Poets Society

 

 

 

 

Even now, at the height of Israel’s attack through containment, military means, and the weaponization or withholding of aid, Palestinian poets are meeting in Gaza to read their poems, do spoken word poetry, and find a respite from the loss, pain, and fear that makes up everyday life as a target of genocide. Young poets, specifically, meet as the Gaza Poets Society, escaping the futurelessness the state of Israel is imposing on Palestinians. They have been doing so since 2018, though their situation has changed considerably over the last two years. They have published two anthologies so far: Love and Loss (2019) and My Death is Not a Song for You to Sing (2024). They are available on the Society’s Buy Me A Coffee page, and buying them is a way to support not just individual lives, or poetry, but a part of humanity as well. Their poems also regularly appear on their Facebook and Instagram pages, easily shareable. And very recently they have launched the poetry journal Gaza Verse.

The Gaza Poets Society is Mohammed Moussa’s vehicle – meaning both that his poetry is a central aspect of what it publishes, with many of his poems featured in the anthologies, but also and much more importantly that he selflessly spends a great amount of time driving others to places for which they yearn, or only had thought possible. This poet from Jabalia Camp, in the north of the Gaza strip, works to share the young poets’ writing, helping weave a thread between them and us by translating them and inserting his own poems. It is he who warns us with the title of the 2024 anthology: the Gaza Poets Society asks that we share voices and songs, that we support them – and, through the Creative Allies page, to join them with our own poets and songs – all this without waiting for their deaths and bemoaning their departure. His poem “My Death Is Not a Song” asks that we remember the children who are still alive and the land that is being turned into a site of destruction in this very moment. To do this, Moussa destabilizes the forgetting of attention and memory that comes so easily and addresses a you that forces the reader to decide whether they have belonged to those who kill children and whether they will continue to do so.

The first anthology includes Basman Elderawi’s love letter to a drone, which is a reflection on and onto the obsession of those who track Palestinians. Amal Saqer shows the continuation of patriarchy and love all at once, adding further contradictions and forms of violence to the tally. Hanin Alholy speaks of the permanence of death installed by its repetition. And Moussa describes his attitude and writes of his efforts, which are those of countless Gazans and other Palestinians: “I still wait to shade you / so I don’t have to write another lament.” These are poems of ash, dust, pieces, fragments; of cages and walls; but also of sea and sky and land, always greater than the narrowing that colonialism imposes. They show us a world that is now in shambles, though still they keep it together in part by reaching out for others. They were written before 2019, at a time when standing together to read poems, for spoken poetry events, still made it possible to outrun pursuers, for a while, when poetry could still act as a refuge.

Since 2023, that world had changed considerably (as has that of the West Bank). In the second anthology, published in 2024, poetry serves to chronicle sorrows. As Bara’ah and Fatimah al-Kilani write:

We write to quiet the rush of anger burning our souls.
We write so that we may thaw the silence that thwarts our uprising. 

We write so that we may stay,
so we may leave memories behind when we inevitably pass through you. 

We are annihilated and we live despite our death.
We remain despite our disappearance. We dream of being read even if in eternal silence.
[...]
We write because happiness has become a forlorn emotion in this city,
my city, where love is a feeling constrained underneath layers of morbid dreams.

With the complementary binaries like thaw/thwart, stay/leave/pass, live/death, remain/disappearance, read/silence, the speakers refuse to pretend that death is absent and to accept it as inevitable, as entirely present. They push against what remains avoidable. They move through the barriers emotions like guilt and helplessness create. They make present themselves as fully human even as they are being starved and regularly in danger.

As we can see in this part of a longer poem, there is much happening in this anthology beyond chronicling. There are attempts here to find words for what seeks to annihilate Gazans, not as a reflection or a look back, not to learn lessons or contain memories, but as death is directed at the poets, at their families, at their neighbours, and as the occupying force continues its genocide. Moussa’s own reflections on writing highlight the imminence of death, the brief character of words and life that burst out in these poems.

And so time is woven into the poems – and especially its splicing. Nadin Murtaja’s “Here” accompanies the slowing down of time, the end of night spreading past the arrival of morning: “time changes, hours pass, / and the darkness grows / until the morning arrives, the sky sheds dimness.” Raneen Azzazi’s speaker instead lives in the short present of repetition and refuses a temporality where bombs are forever falling: “But fear does not mature with age / to the voices that sound the coming of bombs / For the bombs sound different to my ears // every time / And the nerves in my body feel them anew / every time / reacting as though they are hearing the bombs for the first time / every time // I will not let myself get used to the sound of bombs” – the future is claimed as a new present, already contained in the present decision.

Just as remarkable is Murtaja’s “Besieged Sadness.” In long breaths, the poem is exhaled peacefully, even in its grasping and throwing the worst moments at us: “You scream and hit the face of the wall with your tendons and then your voice returns, disappointed because your walls isolate your voice.” Here too, the experience of writing is a matter of attention to the acute present, even as the self becomes ever thinner: “Your write poems and then you burn them, fearful that their letters will fly and be revealed. / You play the tune of your sadness on your thin body, with the broken shards of your mirror on the floor of your room.”

Beyond the chronicle, beyond the telling of stories, on the thin path that allows the poets to maintain their presence what can be cut out and either appropriated and taken away or isolated and left behind, we find love for a people and a land. Hana Hazaim’s “Love of an Olive Tree” wraps the reader not in love for the land, but in the love of the land, the love the land extends to the people who know where to sit, how to look, how to align their body with a place – even if they are cut away from it: “There is a stillness in my back / garden as I lie here drying clothes / swaying to eastern breeze gentle / humming of machine cut grass // There is a similar stillness / amidst the rubble of a Palestinian / home. The loud thunderous drone overhead of machine killed souls.”

The same project carries on through social media posts, where poems live as literary objects and as propaganda (in the best sense of the word) meant to agitate, meant to awaken and move us, as in this poem that interrogates the act of writing through its political intentions:

In “Free Bird,” Taqwa Al Wawi deploys oppositions in couplets to underline the distance between the life of a bird and life in Gaza, making avian life seem the most human of the two: “You eat what grows. / You eat what resists rot.” The speaker envies the bird’s capacity to sing, given the stories they hold back and the words the world will not speak.

In the careful and devastating images of “The Night Refused to Fade” – "screaming dust,” “half-buried in fear” – Ruba Khalid gives part of the feeling that comes with getting bombed, and above all a shattered relationship with space and home.

Affirming life and possibility against a permanently unsettled, hope-crushing present, Hala Al-Khatib narrates the many reversals of the immediate future in “A Half-Hour in Gaza.” The poems maintains and elongates the steadfastness of a moment, the refusal to feel guilt or disappointment, and the love for self and family that make them possible.

In three poems, Mariam Al Khateeb describes precise locations, holding them up as lived places and sites of life against their transformation into targets. Here she threads a series of weary similes; there she names the boredom of heat and survival; elsewhere she writes that “The sea is there as if it doesn’t know that a war has passed; that the world cracked open at night without its knowledge.”

The repetition of knowing, added to an entity that at the very least cognates outside of human ways of knowing, is a reminder of the desire for connection, for the very world and its elements to be more than aware of the reality of life in Gaza.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon wants Palestine to be free and Palestinians to stay alive, thrive, self-determine, and return to their land. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 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 : Underscore, by Julie Carr

Underscore, Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2024

 

 

 

Reading Julie Carr’s collection Underscore, I found myself inhabiting poem after poem. Picking up the book, reading a bit, each time I would need to step away. As if I had read the whole book. Because I had read a whole, a totality. As if I needed to physically move from one poem to another. With each poem being so different from each of the others, their resonance and repetition of chosen elements gives them force, gravitas, gravity. Perhaps there was, is, something about the moment in which I have been reading the book, placing it back on the shelf, picking it up again – reading out of desire, putting it down out of satisfaction, or lack of readiness and steadiness for the next one. Reading Underscore is a physical act.

I have been struggling with the arrangement of the sections – their meaning, that is, the workings of their relations, for it is so precisely clear that they are related and part of a larger whole. Would it be unfair to the book and its author to say that the four sections relate to each other as four settings might on a microscope, focusing closer and closer? That each poem acts like a different sample, which I had to remove to make way for another? Or would binoculars be the correct analogy, focusing in from a wider field and bringing sharper attention only to some details? Might this movement from one area of closer focus to another explain the feeling that I am dealing with each poem as a totality and feel shaken, seeking focus, as I move from one to another?

I can at least follow Carr’s own through line. She gives a dedication for the book as a whole; she adds a dedication to selected poems to the same two people (among other dedications); she adds a note on these dedications, as well as on the title. “Underscore” refers to an improvisational dance practice – one body, one style, moving in different manners, each movement or series of movements existing as its own moment, breaking stillness. This practice has been brought to the dancer – Carr – by a teacher, Nancy Stark Smith. “Underscore” refers perhaps as well to what a poem can do to an emotional (and, or, comma, slash) spiritual state by centring upon it. This practice has been brought to the poet – Carr – by a teacher, Jean Valentine. Both women died in 2020; the dedications are to both women.

In “The Underscore” (22-23), one of the grandest in the collection, Carr addresses observations to Stark Smith, stretching the limits of materiality through an intertwining of alliteration and assonance in felt images, for instance in: “how the throat beats with blood and voice /     coarsing coarse sore”. The poem finds correspondences in all things, at times too direct to allow sameness, but also held together through the thinnest and most tense of metaphors: “raspberry fingertips    tensed tongues / they test the broken edges    of cups.” So often with space on the page for breath, a movement between other movements. Transforming the “how” of the realization into a question, but by making it into a “who,” Carr interrogates Stark Smith, rendering the mystery of friendly and human presence: “who is missing you today? who turned your camera off?”

In “New Year” (105) our mouth is given beautiful movement: “In whitewashed walls, your hand had curved around its pen. / It was your kitchen where you draw your brows / and the phone rang: your daughter.” A whooshing in one line; a repeated hesitation in another; then a lack of conclusion, all in agitated sharp peaks. Likewise in the poem as a whole, a year passes as the new year whooshes in; Valentine’s memory falters, hesitates; she disappears heading downward, leaving a train or entering a subway station. A movement between moments of presence – just like friendship.

The difference between these two poems is perhaps that of the allusiveness of dance and the depth of expression of language – two different ways of moving in the world, one simply faster and more exuberant than the other.

Alongside Smith and Valentine, we find Gillian, a friend, present throughout; we also find K.J., someone with whom she dances. “Good Morning” (47), one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read as a love poem, is dedicated to Peter – though after reading it over I am not so sure it is a love poem. It might simply be an ode to love, to the openness any kind of love, including friendship, can bring to us once we decide to welcome it. The conclusion of this poem is an instruction how to place oneself in relation to others: “since you are to me what this is / What might seem minimal is really maximal / I position myself toward you for all of it.”

We also find Carolyn Grace, in “1.17.15” (59), or rather we find her missing, disappeared, her death and the solidity of winter leaving a group of friends separated, “torn,” her death a “rift.” And in the undedicated “For friendship” (53), Carr places us gently by a river and its natural quiet, only to tear us away by changing the focus to the wider context, that of the hospital by the river, fully in the city – at the same time as she moves from the inside of the body and what it holds, its desires (“how we buried what we wanted in our bodies”), to the violent unpleasantness of smells as the body moves across the ground (“The soil smelled like shit / as a walked a word into the current”). The speaker here sees herself in the hospital window, or sees herself there, on the soil, by the river, as seen from the window – experiencing the reversals proper to friendship, the closeness and similarity that exist even in distance, even in illness, in the closeness or presence of death.

So many elements run through the collection. The river is one. Five poems titled “River,” numbered 1 through 4, then 10, but not in that order, and not in exact succession, remind us that there are flows that move through what we take to be discrete, separate places. Others appear here, rob mclennan among them. Like a river’s currents and undertows, there is no neat distinction between images and ideas in these poems (as in much of the collection). Human life, animal life, vegetal life, elemental life pass into one another as Carr moves beyond analogical or metaphorical thinking into a deeper sameness she finds in what is shared: “After fat felt markers drew their vapor trails on newsprint, we let them, / uncapped, fall to the earth where the roots, relentless / in their water search, seething, maybe, are.” In these river poems, she is acutely aware of violence, of its presence in an undercurrent in our experiences, so often as a desire – “and to know the sadness is to know the flame / that forms in the hand as if the rodent / beneath the rock broke back into its body / to roam” – and she is aware of the workings of pain and its frightfulness: “the headaches that plague you / flow backward through your skull     to snag the silver maple like / barbed wire at the pant leg of a boy.”

“Night” (97-98) may give us the best statement and illustration of the kind of dance poetry enables within us. In writing “the moss takes my footprint only to release it // back outward to    some blue / heron and some rose //    hips bowing” Carr once again passes through metaphor to what is akin to an elemental language, to move and thus to move us, up, slightly, up, higher, low (with the contradictory movement in “rose”) into what is already downward. In this magnificent flux present in the words and between them (and the placement of these words on the page is worth the effort of finding and holding the book), she ensures that we roll from one part of our feet to others, leap toward other places, and leave nothing of us behind as we pass into other forms of life, floating as if carried by them.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 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 ne ferai pas de casse-tête de dauphin, by Cherry Blue

Je ne ferai pas de casse-tête de dauphin, Cherry Blue
Bouc Productions, 2025

 

  

Cherry Blue writes from a distance. The distance anxiety creates with a surrounding world that lies outside of any control. The distance that separates one woman from those who seek success and maternity. The distance between a sex worker, her clients, and the alienating atmosphere of the strip club. The distance a person who has created intricate relationships with people who come from a variety of trajectories establishes from her conservative family.

These instances of distance are not due to a lack of understanding or connection. They emerge from the speaker’s awareness of her own situation and an assumed and accepted lack of adherence to expectations. And they might act as a bulwark against the onslaught of small destructions and crimes against humanity Cherry Blue mentions in her poems. They make it possible for the poems to be a response and protect the subjected self. The poems then act as a space away from anxiety, in the eye of its storm rather than at a distance:

only at the strip club am I anxiety-proof, I know I’m protected by homonyms and the search for incantations, the indifference toward customers attenuates the heaviness of social circuses, the dissolved voice no longer counts

je ne suis imperméable à l’angoisse qu’au strip club, je me sais protégée par les homonymes et la quête incantatoire, l’indifférence envers les clients atténue la lourdeur des cirques sociaux, la voix dissoute ne compte plus (37)

 

The title of Blue's collection Je ne ferai pas de casse-tête de dauphin ("I will not be doing dolphin puzzles") refers to a form of advice that is out of phase with reality, in lieu of therapy for anxiety. It also refers more generally and less explicitly – but increasingly clearly as the collection progresses – to the strong desire within society to avoid change, to deeper social anxieties leading repetition to drive social and species reproduction. In such a setting, repetition is not a personal maladapted strategy, but a feature of the system; Cherry Blue helps us see where it is located. The issue, for her, is to exit this urge for repetition and remain ourselves as we undergo vast technological and (anti-)democratic changes: “when forces crush the metals / can we pretend to be our own disguise?” ("quand les forces broient les métaux / peut-on se déguiser en soi-même?," 56)

Her tone varies as it moves between wonder, indignation, irony, confession (“I don’t just like irony I also like confessions,” she writes; "je n'aime pas que l'ironie j'aime aussi les confessions," 41) and she herself shifts between surrealism and an extreme, tired realism. The book itself allows for variation through the use of pictures (the author also being a photographer), mostly but not solely in black and white. These in turn allow for text to find other forms by being superimposed and forming other motifs, and by being inserted through text boxes that seem to illustrate the pictures. The softness of these pictures, through blur and a form of fogginess, makes the text sharper and incisive even as the words tend toward casualness and everyday speech; the difficulty of holding on to their pictorial components adds to the sense of flow and slow chaos at the heart of the text. And so we read, opposite a full-page picture featuring a nude figure, gentle and long against broken, sharp rock and a jagged horizon: “the rope gains density / the rope creates shapes in space // beauty is a little tiny armchair” (la corde se densifie / la corde crée des formes dans l’espace // la beauté est un tout petit fauteuil, 55)

In its exploration and multi-faceted originality, this collection is held together by desire: a desire for a productive destruction; a desire for a rudimentary form of patience in the face of the compulsion to renounce ourselves and simply give up. The two are inseparable and through them, the whole points us toward a stern form of hope.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

Jérôme Melançon : Au passage du fleuve, by Paul Chanel Malenfant

Au passage du fleuve, Paul Chanel Malenfant
Le Noroît, 2024

 

 

 

The first time I heard Paul Chanel Malenfant read, I was overcome by the greatest sense of calm and wonder. I had the sharpest awareness that he was reading to us, of his presence, his solemn and airy voice, his accentuated and flowing reading. Much like certain storytellers do not disappear in their stories but instead walk with us alongside their narrative, he used his poems as a pretext to draw near us and carry us. His latest collection, Au passage du fleuve (Passing the River), gave me the impression he was reading to me. The poet is there, writing on the page just as I am reading, telling me something that is not a narrative yet borrows from storytelling, mixing impressionist poetry with the grave tone of one who is opening themselves to others in order to open them to experiences they couldn’t otherwise have known about. He is deliberate about writing:

Thus, I sort out the syllables of winter hours
to experience the sensation of time the beating
of the heart with each sentence the passing pulsation
and the absolute certainty of my disappearance
in the clarity of ink when language sometimes
as it passes the river illuminates it. 

Ainsi, j’ordonne les vocables des heures d’hiver
pour éprouver la sensation du temps le battement
du cœur à chaque phrase la pulsation passagère
et l’absolue certitude de ma disparition
dans la clarté de l’encre quand le langage parfois
au passage du fleuve l’illumine. (96)

This is not the first time Malenfant lets himself be carried by the current of the great river (a fleuve being a river that leads to the sea). His first collection was Poèmes de la mer pays (Poems of the Sea Country, with HMH in 1976), and since then he had also published Fleuves (Rivers, Le Noroît, 1997). He mentions this frequent return to the St. Lawrence River in the pages that open and close the collection, both as an acknowledgment of the need for a return to the same places, the same waters, and to explain it. 

In this new collection, writing is like attempting to steer or swim with the current, against the undertow and against treacherous obstacles. When describing his writing, Malenfant speaks of drifting, but his ability with language is such that we feel at every moment that he is allowing this drifting to take place. Yet there is no illusion of control. Some risk remains, but he is confident in his experience and practice. In the many poems within this collection that include reflections on writing and poetry, we receive the words of a guide who might also be describing rowing and paddling, not to give instructions or to prescribe, but to allow their passengers to develop a keener appreciation and understanding for the relationship that a person can build with water and its currents. The Rimouski native writes about the Bas-St-Laurent and Gaspésie regions of Québec as if they were surrounded by water, cut off from the rest of the continent, floating. Images surface slowly, compose themselves through rising proximity and the dissipation of fog, and the poems describe this process they support: “The time of copper is arriving. / The grey of the charcoal lifts. / The mist its own dimension” (Voici venir le temps du cuivre. / La grisaille du fusain s’efface. / La brume trompe l'œil, 49).

This time the river is moved by memory. Memories of the speaker’s parents, memory that confronts death, that is drawn to it, but in order to keep and tend to the life of the suicided and of the other deceased. We approach grief but feel no loss. Images and memories surface, whole and captivating, poignant, along the way. They have the consistency of objects; they are not fleeting but being immobile, they are quickly left behind.

A few poems especially struck me. One is so complete and wrapped around itself, wrapped around the collection and wrapped up inside it, that a full translation seemed inevitable, in addition to calling out to my voice among innumerable other voices:

Once the books have vanished from within your memory
and Segalen’s shadows and voices have drowned in the sea,
will you know to spurt out, between seaweed and chaos,
between transhumance and agony will you know to awaken
your dead, father and mother reconciled in ash,
will you know to lead to slumber in your drowsy soul
as a nightlight, the melancholy of being in the world? 

Without a reprieve. Without a future.

Untitled like all poems in the collection, it appears on page 109, late in the collection and toward the end of a section where much of the emphasis is placed on the father. Malenfant weaves through these poems the figures of the father and mother, as well as those of his father and mother, usually separately. He moves between their pasts, their deaths, their presences and absences to each other and mostly to him, and the archetypes and desires that are parents, abstracted from their lifetimes and his.

Another leads into itself, unfurls itself as an extension of its question, of its life, of the experiences it focuses, making explicit the ontological concerns of the collection, on page 50:

My heart lifts the stardust, the question of origins, then faints.

I see figurines of distressed girls between veils of rain shaken over the horizon. I hear the lapping of the tongue deep within the empty shells. I witness the crumbling of daily gestures between the walls.

Vocal cords are untangled on the sound-table, in front of the stones that were set on the shore, among the sea buckthorn.

Malenfant’s relationship to the flow of water is tumultuous, sometimes hidden and only felt, and at times conflictual: “I am subjected to the violent heart of things. At the mixing up of chaos and echo, at the abolition of the rumour of the water” (Je suis soumis au cœur violent des choses. Là où se confondent le chaos et l’écho, où s’abolissent les rumeurs de l’eau, 63.)

To this subjection Malenfant mixes an adaptive resistance, swimming or rowing where the current will let him decide to go, maintaining his capacity to move and so live – just like he writes to maintain his voice: “I write river with words of rain on windowpane, in search of echoes and glimmer, so I do not lose my voice within the insanity of massacres to the soil of my era” (J’écris fleuve avec des mots de pluie sur la vitre, en quête d’échos et de lueurs, pour ne pas perdre ma voix dans la folie des massacres au terreau de mon époque, 26).

To say that the writing in this collection is exquisite might be unfair to poems that are so often solid, and so well anchored in shores and riverbeds. It is certainly beautiful, in the way a river can be beautiful during grey days just as in the sunlight that makes it shimmer, but especially at moments when the weather changes and it unveils all its possibilities at once.

 

 

 [see Jérôme Melançon's translation of four poems by Paul Chanel Malenfant here]

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018), in addition to several published and ongoing translations of poems, academic texts, and archival documents. He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this, notably on settler colonialism in Canada. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.