Elanor Spring : you, by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

you, Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure
Book*hug Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

Throughout her prolific career as a translator, Erín Moure’s work dances between the  strange spaces language inhabits. Her recent translation, the book length poem you by francophone writer Chantal Neveu, directly considers the complexities between relationship and language, whether it is expression between two or many, the harmony of reaching duality with another, or language’s inability to grasp feelings towards the self and the other. These notions feel entirely compatible with translation as Moure deftly beckons a full-voiced poem from the French, yet simultaneously retains the shimmering otherness of a translated work underneath. As such, the strange polyphony of familiar and other becomes reified.

Here, the other refers to every conceivable other– multiple iterations of personal pronouns become at once strange and recognizable, as even the self has the capacity for the unknown. In the slight narrative present, the poem gestures towards love, infidelity, motherhood, and the sensuality of bodies, but the driving forces are entirely language-dependent. The sharpness of the words surround themselves, glancing off of the primary pronouns “I”, “you”, “she”, “he” and “we” which fade in and out, intangibly sparkling, “I want you fully / desire to possess you entirely”. Just as the self and the other are knowable and unknowable, so too is the exactness of the reader’s senses. What you is capable of is intimacy at arm’s length- exposure without total revelation, revelation without complete knowledge. 

nothing is

and the air

the image

This direct refusal to indulge in over-explanation results in a unique clarity, the ability of every line to contain its own energy and multitude of interpretive possibilities; as one line says, “you clear space”. In this way, the construction of the poem lends itself to spaciousness, mimetically enacting time spent with another, the breath between bodies. Despite the lack of linear narration, the erotic nature of the poem is a force all its own, calling attention to tangible instances of separation and closeness. In these lines, love is a power that mimics the lovers

themselves: overshadowing, lingering, trembling between every line Neveu writes:

 

is any existential plane untouched by eros

you ask me to pull myself together

I’m undecided

exiled 

we both agree

desire generates aberrations

love is bigger than any of us 

Love weaves itself into each tangible aspect of language as a fractal, visible on the page in unrelenting lines. Love and language glance off one another, creating a sense of intertwining devotion only to be distanced and othered in the same breath. Despite the acknowledged magnitude of eros, it nevertheless is ubiquitous, seeping into the cracks of each pronoun, as devastating as it is restorative. The poem asks that we let ourselves be saturated with our own ineptitude at pairing eros to words and makes us unable to stand completely on firm ground. 

In loving, we must take the other as they are, or appear to be in whatever light we perceive them: “we fathom each other / molecules vibrate / we are proportional”. Every pronoun corresponds to each other, misunderstands each other, returns again to language and love in spite of our losses. In loving, in language, we construct the other and ourselves, imagining that our desires are somehow compatible. Neveu writes, “expressing desires / available / requesting nothing / you dispense with words”. Here, the duality of expression and the absence of articulation reverberates through the lines, creating a space where contradictions flourish and become possible. We cannot bear (and must) the knowledge that we may never fully understand one another, in the same way that we cannot fully understand each line of language in this poem. To seek complete understanding is then to miss the beauty that the other reflects into ourselves. In the translator’s postface, Moure describes the poem you as “one of the precious metals, a gem extracted from its rocky source.” Aptly, this asks the reader to be the chisel of extraction in much the same way the poem serves as a chisel to the reader. As the reader must extricate the poem, line by line, so you extricates the reader from themselves, upending understanding in favor of multifaceted movement. In this way, the reader and the poem are again the self and the other in relationship, “honouring the initial induction / the immediate joyous adhesion / vocal / physiological”. The exactness of the lines presents the need to adhere to one another and seek to create a glimmering oneness which is ultimately reliant on the reflection of others. 

The beauty of Moure’s translation is a chisel itself– her ability to exact the precise preciousness of each word and moment from the original French gives you its gem-like radiance. Like a stone, examining the poem closely gives way to detail and precision, each line sharp enough to slice. Throughout the poem, Moure has chosen to leave certain words in the original language, adding another layer of relationship. Moments where words are left untranslated add to the sensation of otherness, even if the reader is familiar with French. This choice gives the work an additional dimension of recognition which begins as a jolt of strangeness. Lighting upon “l’a-venir” for example, Moure leaves the word with its multiplicity, as it means both “future” and, as it’s constructed with the hyphen, “what is to come”. The single word becomes simple and complex, surrounded by the whiteness of the page and containing its own self, its own other, its own duality. Applying this to the act of translation, of bringing a work from one language to another, Moure gives the reader certain true cognates in which to feel othered. One line reads, “en silence”, beginning with the French word for “in” and then ending with the possibly French, possibly English “silence”. The act of translation becomes living and open, beckoning language’s interpretation. Moure’s translation and exquisite attention to each facet of the poem imbues the work with uncapturable energy and movement. 

In the translation of Neveu’s you, Moure furthers and amplifies the unknowable relationships that shimmer even as they alter. The reader is at once invited in and excluded, spoken to and eavesdropping, equilibrated and unbalanced. you presents an opportunity to be lost and found in equal measure, to examine more closely ourselves and others, to remain willing participants in eros and language, and in each scintillating line, “we don’t resist the vectors of enthrallment”.

 

 

 

 

 

Elanor Spring is a poet and translator from Boise, Idaho. She holds a BA in French and a BA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. She’s currently a graduate student at the University of Maine in Orono studying Poetry and Poetics. Her work can be found in Oroboros, fig.press, and forthcoming from P-Queue.

rob mclennan : As If And, by Zach Peckham

As If And, Zach Peckham
New Mundo Press, 2026

 

 

 

 

I was curious about the full-length debut by Cleveland poet, editor and publisher Zach Peckham, As If And (Queens NY/Buenos Aires, Argentina: New Mundo Press, 2026), following his chapbook cycle hum (Sistrum Books, 2025). Clustered across seven untitled sections, the poems that make up As If And are built as accumulations, short phrases and individual words stacked in staccato upon each other, allowing the narratives to unfold as they will down each individual page. “We wanted / A gauze / To step / Thru like a / Wall,” begins the five page gymnastic “And Effect,” “Curtain / Of water / Which flat / -tens a city // In a / Far / Away place we // Want / -ed to be / A buildingful [.]” Further through the same poem, writing: “”To a livery / ‘s prism // Spun / Sing / -ing chamber of / Schism // -ed re- / Volver // Offered soluble / Solid object // Re: bodies / Spawned / And -ified [.]” Peckham writes a stagger, staccato; a way through and into, writing perception across a sequence of fractures. As he writes, within the five page “Crossing Co”: “the scene / what it is // you do here / when time is // in arrears / mooned in // to a clear / -ing pock- // marked pocket / little envelope // of a life / enveloped [.]”

Working through a sequence of extensions through a cavalcade of mixed and fragmented sound and syntax, there’s an element of simultaneous propulsion and meditative slowness across these staggered phrases, placing sounds and meaning in an array of such wonderful collision (made more forceful through a printing error that replicates the first ten pages twice, an accident it took a few minutes to realize). Certain poems even hold an echo of works by such as Vancouver poets Jeff Derken [see my review of his latest here] or Windsor poet Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here] or Calgary poet ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of their latest here] for the use of accumulation and short/clipped phrases across social and ecological concerns, such as the poem “Purpose Built,” that begins: “exciting opportunity / a subdivision / things I’ve had / burned off me / or otherwise / beside a highway / immaculate frontages / this dewdrop world / takes place inside / an avocado universe / so there’s that [.]” Overall, there’s something quite stunning in the way Peckham pulls at each poem’s thread to extend the lyric as far as it might travel, taking it a bit further, pulling without fray or any stretch of the poem falling apart, away. Caryl Pagel describes this collection as “a noise poetics amassed from scrap parts,” and I don’t think there’s any better way to describe it. Or, as the six-page poem “Initiate’s Lament” ends:

a slip

this life
a blooper 

reel a blip

a number

a clip

a slumber

a slip

a horse

you ride

a box

you tick

a pen

you click

submit

and save

a lathe

a spade

a cave

a crypt

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he has never won a book award. His latest poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), has just landed! As well as new chapbooks with Broke Press and through the subpress collective, so that’s pretty cool.

 

Justin March : locust blindfold stompchant rain, by Neil Flory

locust blindfold stompchant rain, Neil Flory
arteidolia press, 2026

 

 

 

To experience Neil Flory’s collection locust blindfold stompchant rain is to explore the fringes of structure, sound, and wordcraft. Flory’s lines are frenetic yet deliberate, offering a shrewd perception of the world withdrawn from behind a syntactic curtain. His works project volume, both in their verbosity and their tenor. At first glance, language sprawls the page, dissected and dissonant, but before long what Flory has encoded surfaces to the reader’s awareness. Lyrics by The Doors interject fleetingly into and out of  “$$$whiskeytoasts,” interrupting the poem’s deep consideration of life’s transience and opportunities, a sort of carpe diem plea for a rock and roll soul. In the simpler, but no less poignant, “the new arrivals,” Death ponders the wretchedness of his quarry through haiku verse. And the poem “ex” highlights Flory as both a composer of music and verse as it bends the limits of meter and structure, reading something like how e. e. cummings might transcribe a Coltrane set. Weaving musical argot amidst mid-word enjambments and spontaneously-born compound words, the poem escorts its stumbling audience through the crescendo and rapid plummet of heartache. Throughout the collection, Flory’s reader feels as though taken on a journey, shown a glimpse of an experience difficult to nail down, like a waking sleeper parsing details and impressions from a fading dream.

 

 

 

 

Born and raised outside New Haven along the Connecticut Shoreline, Justin March moved to Saratoga Springs, New York to study English at Skidmore College. After several years of teaching abroad, working as an editor, and wandering the earth, he returned to complete his graduate studies at CUNY City College of New York, earning his Masters in English Language and Literacy in 2011. He taught English in the CUNY system before relocating to SUNY Jamestown Community College in Chautauqua County, where he currently teaches and serves as department chair. In addition to reading and writing, he enjoys drumming with local musicians, hatching plans to travel the world, engaging in hijinks with his wife and three daughters, and pondering the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

rob mclennan : Ribgrass, Poems by Nicole Mae

Ribgrass, Poems, Nicole Mae
Peachpiles, 2026

 

 

 

I was intrigued to see Bronwen Wallace-shortlisted Saskatchewan poet Nicole Mae’s self-produced Ribgrass, Poems (Peachpiles, 2026), supported by SK Arts, and a title that apparently follows their prior full-length collections Youth (2018) and Screaming Sweet Nothings (2019). Opening with the short title poem, Ribgrass, Poems extends across eight sections of short poems and erasures—“SUMMER,” “AUTUMN,” “WINTER,” “SPRING,” “NYÁR,” “ÖSZ,” “TÉL” and “TAVASZ”—as Mae writes through first-person observational lyrics and the occasional erasure to articulate landscape and the body, including precise moments through heartbreak, misadventure, desire and chronic illness. Mae’s self-description in their author biography includes: “Their poems, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Hungarian diaspora, prairie queerness, ill body, shame, and romantic love.” As the title poem begins: “I stand in a pasture. / Dry winds scarf my throat. / Humid meadows / taste / knees. // Bend. / Dove sky / into olive grass.” There’s a delicate intimacy, a smallness, to the approach of Mae’s lyric, one attuned very close to the physical landscape of their southwest Saskatchewan. As the acknowledgments for the collection includes: “Ribgrass was created on Treaty 4 Territory—the land of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Nations, as well as the Homeland of the Métis Nation. This work recognizes the deep relationship between land, water, and community, and it honours their enduring stewardship.”

Cloxacillin

I decided not to tell you
that I’ve started antibiotics again. 

I eat them with a runny yolk, tinfoil potatoes,
and terror.

There are ways that Mae’s poems offer themselves as a loose sequence or assemblage of short lyric scenes, extending their way across the larger landscape of the full collection. Listen to the thread of the short poem “Fresh Cream Warm Cashmere,” that reads: “Every morning, / I put on a coconut and sandlalwood perfume. // I spritz my neck and both wrists, / then let it marinate into skin. // Wihin quiet moments, / I think of you. // I wonder if this fragfrance has travelled by wind / to your doorstep.” Working through memory and observation, these poems do offer themselves as the landscape of their narrator, from how the experience of geography can’t help but impact how one develops, reacts and thinks, and how illness can’t help but impact upon the landscape of the body. There is a looseness to this collection, and at times an unevenness, that might provide comparisons more to a day-book or poetic journal, over, say, a highly-crafted poetry collection. The poems exist in conversation with each other across a far larger structure, one might think, offering moments across this particular landscape, some clipped and exact, while others across a rougher ground, all the while attending that same quiet precision.

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan has a new poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press), as well as shiny new chapbooks through Subpress Collective and Broke Press. The late Gord Downie once recommended his second full-length collection, bury me deep in the green wood (ECW Press, 1999), so that was cool.

 

Kim Fahner : What Is Broken Binds Us, by Lorne Daniel

What Is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel
University of Calgary Press, 2025

 

 

 

Lorne Daniel’s new collection, What Is Broken Binds Us, explores the spaces and places where things have broken. The wounds of loss are painful, of course, but offer places of learning and expansion. There is an allusion to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when the cracks of broken items are mended with gold. In the mending, in the place where the gold joins things back together, there is a newly forged strength.

In “The Breaks,” which  documents a bicycle accident, the speaker writes of how they hover above their broken body: “I am him. He is here. Someone/else/gone.” There is an “ambulance, a jarring ride, the bowl/of my body not holding. Sacrum./Sacred bone. Holy bone.” This is followed by a conversation with a surgeon who speaks of “Reduction. Fixation. Being fixed, repaired, becoming/fixated.” Afterwards, in “Sing Vibratos of Light,” the speaker “lifts and steps the rubber-footed/walker down hollow corridors, a new wing.” His “only worry now that he must return//to the familiar before he is missed.” He must rush to heal before the world moves on without him, not caring that physical and emotional healing takes the time it takes. Beginning with physical breaks is a certain place to begin, but the poems then shift towards larger, more philosophical considerations.

In What Is Broken Binds Us, the poet traces the history of his family origins in poems like “When the Tributaries Ran Rich,” “Tack, Harness, Lash,” and “Lang may yer lum reek.”  In “Ways to Find Family in a Forest,” Daniel traces the migration of a 14-year-old ancestor, Constance Hopkins, coming to realize that “I am one of 75,000 (give or take) descendants/of Constance, who bore 11 children, lived to 72./We 75,000 tracked across this continent and beyond.”  The poet does not avoid his family’s less comfortable history, beginning to write about slavery and property ownership in “Approaching Magnolia.”

In the poem, “In the Family Name,” Daniel broaches a darker side of his family tree: “Stories, grief, celebration. Distance, absence, loss. Where to start,/as a Daniel bearing the name of an English/enslaver, where to even begin?” There, in South Carolina, on a tour, “a descendant/of enslaved people talks...[of] Back-breaking/cotton-picking, blood-sucking disease-carrying/mosquitos, lashings, hunger, fear, the danger of the wrong/eye contact.” There, too, the poet comes to grips with the fact that “This is where our people came from./Where they were comfortable.” In “Fugue and Spiritual,” siblings walk in the place where ancestors once enslaved people. The poet asks, “How did the ancestors, my/kin, enslave?” and wonders how they might have done such a thing “in favour of iron/ implements, paper money.” The recognition of a family’s dark history is something that causes sorrow lay “heavy here/in wills and deeds, in the bloodline. Embodied.” The stories of the past, horrific, time travel to 2015, “tempo and tone/playing out now.”

More personal poems also populate the collection, with the speaker referring to a broken familial relationship—one between parents and son. In “Fluency (First Loss),” a child begins to explore language, but chooses to speak to his father on a Fisher Price phone rather than on a real one. The final stanza of the poem foreshadows a later departure as the child “swings/from story into song.” As he continues speaking, “his voices rises and rises/until with one high note he slips away.” In “Play Bonded,” the boy moves from 4 to 14, becoming more isolated as he listens to music through headphones, “blinkered under hoodie,” becomes “Here not here.” Then, in the poetic sequence titled, “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” Daniel heartbreakingly documents the ways in which an adult child can slip into worlds of addiction and mental illness, painting a picture of how parents can try their best to be supportive, but not always successful in saving a person who does not want to be saved.

In “You Don’t Get Here Without,” the poet writes “People don’t send cards” to mourn “the anniversary/of an estrangement” and reminds the reader that “It takes at least two to be estranged.” What Daniel does here, in addressing familial estrangement, is shed light on something that is often hidden or avoided. The longer humans live, it seems, the more chance there might be of estrangement of some sort. It’s refreshing to see it written about in such an honest and vulnerable way as it might perhaps encourage others to speak of their own estrangements without fear of stigma or judgement.

Loss is also something most North Americans tend to avoid. The last section of Lorne Daniel’s What is Broken Binds Us returns to the earlier poems of physical brokenness. In “To Carry an Absence,” he writes, wisely: “To carry an absence, learn to lean/a little, not so anyone might notice, but just/to feel a certain balance shift.” Daniel has his reader shift towards thoughts of physicality and mortality, reminding them of how brief a human lifetime is so that his poems encourage them to take note of how we can take appreciate and value broken things to better live more fully during the time we’re given.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Melanie Marttila : Yield, by Jaime Forsythe

Yield, Jaime Forsythe
Wolsak and Wynn, 2026

 

 

 

 

This long poem dives into the experience of postpartum depression to which one has no choice but to yield. Early on, leaving the city with family including newborn for the seashore, “I unfold to the inarticulable / shroud”. Actions are automatic. Emotions are remote until “verging on shore, / where grey swells glide to their limits and melt.” This is the desired state, to melt into … nothing at all, or merely something else?

Presented against the backdrop of the Maritime coast, the metaphors are oceanic, reaching back to the amniotic fluid in which we all first learn to swim, and forward to a time when the postpartum veil is lifted. There are also the hallmarks of landlocked Maritime life: a dead mouse in the wall, identified by the smell of decay, the digging of wells, fields of birds and animals and insects, mudflats and bluffs. Then there are bathtubs and swimming pools and saltwater tanks, attempts to escape the weight of ideation.

At first, she flinches “passing the magnetic knife holder when I go down / / for water, like I’d close my fingers around its blade / by mistake.” She likens her breastfeeding child to lichen and the ebbing tide, remembers the pressure of birthing among other scattered memories, interspersed with facts about Maritime flora and fauna, wants to “join the sponge, the mermaid’s / purse, the moon snail … sea lettuce and invertebrates who / continue to exist” even as she relates to the bluffs, eroding “ten centimetres or fifteen each year / / and what an elegant blueprint for leaving, crumbling / exit, every hair that scores the tile a thread closer / / to stop”.

The physical trials: first menstruation post-birthing, the realization that one’s pelvic floor has weakened, stitches absorbed and an opening altered, waiting to flower, but “[c]offee grounds and death, / / peppermint oil and death: impossible to hide / the chemical reaction, decomposition wallpapered / / to our nostrils, our skulls.” Ideation slinks “in the dysphoric slide post-letdown … Letdown and every burner / left on high, door bolted from the inside.”

Also:

I’ve walked alone just as the sun’s gone
neon, in clouds of mosquitoes, ears ringing

from your scream, the meadow rife with hidden
wells ready to take me. Dark mouths under long

grass, inexplicable – easy. A matter of one step
into a slot – a room – a womb.

Later, Forsythe’s verse fragments—things always get worse before they get better—becomes lists of things seen, without explanation or sense. Sleep deprivation drains and dysregulates, enforces a kind of narcolepsy, sleep taking its chances wherever it finds them. Life blurs, becomes a dream, a mosaic of memory.

Observation becomes a means of healing, of reclamation: “I take notes in case / I’m asked to prove what I’ve seen with two eyes, / / sketch the reeds snaking in through the window’s / gap.”

Until finally:

“… I didn’t

expect to still be here, hunched over the unresolvable, bobbing
between fight and surrender. The signal fades in and out and out

and I want to join the air, which I’m told is a door to the next
phase of thinking where I learn to unlatch from my spirals.”

Liminality and the juxtaposition of states play out in couplets. A gorgeous exploration of the postpartum experience.

 

 

 

 

 

Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

rob mclennan : Yield, by Jaime Forsythe

Yield, Jaime Forsythe
Wolsak & Wynn, 2026

 

 

 

The third full-length poetry title by East Coast poet Jaime Forsythe, following Sympathy Loophole (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2012) and I Heard Something (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/a feed dog book, 2018), is Yield (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2026), a collection constructed as a book-length accumulation of untitled, clustered poem-structures. Yield is less a collection of poems, say, than a single idea that reveals itself, slowly, one piece at a time, offering its title both as the result of what had been planted, and the suggestion of, if not to give in, but to be open, allow. “In these dreamlike lines a mother faces the postpartum voice from a porous house by the ocean as the veil between land and sea,” the back cover copy writes, “and between being lost and being found, grows thinner.” There is an abstract across Forsythe’s lyric, one through which better to articulate the space within, one might say. “Moon snail bores a hole / in the shell of its prey,” she writes, “husks to be strung / into jewellery once // sucked dry. Intertidal / empties littler the sand, // sharp on bare feet.”

Subtitled “a poem,” Yield floats as a singular, extended structure through a blend of ecopoetic and pregnancy/motherhood, articulating a sequence of meditative lyric fragments around fragility, ecologies and post-partum isolations. “Field interrupted by crop circles,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “wheat / depressed where I flatten to watch the drone // do its scenic capture, propellered eye / rolling over bivalves, tire swings, bald eagle // who waits out UFOs from a pine. I was saying / something when I came out here to lie down // in the path split through a paragraph of reeds, / egg-shaped structure in the distance, dropped // pendant a period.”

Her lyric is detailed, intimate and immersive; composed via an adherence to the accumulated couplets and line breaks, a structure clearly and carefully constructed, even across the more overt collision of words, words. “I paid to float in a tank of salt water / boasting ten times the salinity of sea. // At eight months along, I gladly gave up / gravity, invited exceptions to the accepted // theories. The bleached pod was dark and hushed / but for my own internal sloshing, and yours, // sealed away from diesel engine, perennial / siren, voice of crow. With credit, I could afford // submersion three times over forty-one weeks. / To abandon the world’s din for zero symphonic // decibels a luxury tinted with shame.” There’s a clatter to Forsythe’s lyric movement, seeking calm through the chaos, with a structure carved, perhaps, as a kind of scaffolding, all that might hold the subject matter together. With a clear eye, Forsythe’s lyric is at turns grounded while being ungrounded while impossibly ground down, attempting a clarity, perhaps, through the composition itself. “When blood volume balloons and abdomen / hardens,” she writes, near the end, “that’s a warning about endurance.”

Barrier of black spruce
orange sky threaded with branches 

over the crib’s parenthesis
where you don’t sleep 

on parading llamas
I wade into the temperate quarry 

bathing suit bunched, stroke
the grey mirror 

foil surface of joy
your wet wiggle 

buttoned into polka-dotted
pyjamas a pearl 

appears
on blushing gums

 

 

 

rob mclennan has a new poetry book out this month, edgeless, with Caitlin Press, and a chapbook out right now with Broke Press. Another chapbook is due soon with Subpress, his first of a supposed three, which is pretty cool, also.

Lori Anderson Moseman : My Man, by Esperanza Cintrón

My Man, Esperanza Cintrón
Seven Kitchens Press, 2026

 

 

 

Meet “loose limbed Lawrence” who “shoulda played horn in a jazz bar.” Meet Gordon who “sold ice cream out of a tricycle cart” – “the first to take the Greyhound to California.” Meet Tony who “rode life like a buckaroo” and Teddy who was “bandy pit bull” and Harold and Jeff and … . My Man, Esperanza Cintrón’s stunning new chapbook, sings the blues for all the brothers. She embraces them, everyone. Each poem is a full community. By my count, over 40 souls assemble in the first 10 pages of this 26-page chapbook just released by Seven Kitchens Press.

Think Franny Brice. Think Billie Holiday. Feel sonic brilliance. My Man scores “lyrics that elevate her man’s [every brother’s] ordinariness.” Cintrón’s celebrates Detroit’s Black, Brown and working-class men “who sacrificed for our right to learn, to think and speak freely, to create, to be.” This powerful chapbook is vital reading in 2026.

The poem “Prodigy” praises Leroy Hyter and musicians like him who can “glide and prance/ over the keys / all sass and fineness.” I could say that about Cintrón’s lyricism. She has sweet finesse. “Icicles and hot pokers / skip down my spine” whether she’s writing a fiery short-lined poem or a luxurious sultry one.

The sensuous speaker in the title poem, “My Man,” coaxes a lover to remembers how to be vulnerable.

“… I call him baby cuz it
reminds him to be gentle to recall
how it was before he was forced 
to walk point before the barbs
and spikes penetrated his shield
lashed his soul and left him wary
before he learned that tenderness
was a weakness I call him baby....”

The poet traces her musical roots back to her father’s “short-lived record store” in Detroit’s Spanish speaking Southwest side. His 78s gave boleros, rumbas and mambos. When her father returned to Puerto Rico, her mother moved her to the Westside “that had just opened up to Black folks because of ‘white flight.’” There, Esperanza learned poetics from divas Ruth Brown, Etta James and Dinah Washington. Her teenage aunts “tuned transistor radios up to maximum” so the whole house could sing with Dionne Warwick, Mary Wells and Aretha.

I read My Man aloud to feel words dance on my tongue. I plan to memorize “Poets.”

“I know some / who work / in civil service/
on the line at Fords’s / in diner’s flipping burgers /
or doing time in dank cells / men who juggle words /
like marbles in their mouths / as they slip tickets /
under windshields / or press plates for the state… .”

Cintrón’s keen eye sees human hunger. In “What the Mugger Looked Like,” the brother who “wore a T-shirt / state mascot dead center and/ is jaw was an unmarred plane / fresh like sister’s linebacker boyfriend” is in need as much as the one “with the Nike hoodie… / full petulant lips … / and sighed mournfully / like a destitute Bryon.”

Those who know Esperanza Cintrón’s work know her intense love of Detroit is astute. You get a deep portrait of the city if you read her oeuvre:  Chocolate City Latina, Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise: Detroit Poems and Boulders, Detroit Nature Poems. Shades, Detroit Love Stories, published by Wayne State University Press, was a Michigan Notable Book in 2020. What Keeps Me Sane won the Naomi Long Madgett Award.

Not all poems in this book happen in Detroit. “Quiet Violence” could happen anywhere, as the speaker of the poem is pulled over by a cop because of her locks. The speaker “holds it in” with the officer,  but readers hear her cradle with care “the legions / of men and boys / who have gone down / for less.”

“La Dulzura,” a joyous piece, unfolds in Loiza, Puerto Rico, after father has died. The sweetness of her abuelita singing a “tender bolero” enters the poem’s reverie as her last living tio chews the tip of a sugar cane stalk. Memory and music layer themselves into an ancestral celebration.

In “It Feels Good,” my body tenses then embraces the wife who takes a lover to stave off earthquakes, toxic air, melting ice caps, human extinction, and her husband’s revenge. The poet plays with spacing, cushioning readers as they acknowledge: yes, “our world will explode” and yes, pleasure makes room for “tomorrow.”

Esperanza Cintrón’s grace is infused with a fierce understanding of struggle-- race and class. Her wisdom is born of protest, of “primordial knowledge.” When she holds herself, her brothers and her readers accountable, she does so with generosity. Reading My Man makes me move through my town with more empathy for the men who inhabit.

My Man is part of the A. V Christie Series of Seven Kitchen Press based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The beautiful cover art, Soul Mate, is by Larry Green.

 

 

 

 

Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work is the chapbook Whittle Gristle from above/ground press (2025). Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration, is available from A Viewing Space. Okay and Too Few Words were above/ground press chapbooks in 2023. Her experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her earlier prose poems see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). For samples of those books and her archive, see https://loriandersonmoseman.com. She lives in Eugene OR.

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.