QUEBEC CITY
This selection of poetry from Quebec City was made by Les libraires literary magazine, text translated by Simon Brown.
Les visages de la terre
Chosen by Josée-Anne Paradis
Nestled within Quebec City is the village of Wendake, the centre of the Huron-Wendat Nation. Wendake is a place overflowing with talented artists, among them Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, an acclaimed author and passionate advocate of Indigenous literature in Quebec. Most of Picard-Sioui’s books are published by Hannenorak, a publishing house dedicated to Indigenous literatures also based in Wendake.
In his moving collection Les visages de la terre, Picard-Sioui speaks directly to his late grandmother, and shares with readers a spirituality deeply rooted in the land, and in his origins. I stay busy / while you rest in the heart of the earth / you’ve earned it / you need it / I pet the grass and trim the dog. Contemporary and accessible, his writing speaks to grief and tradition, while also forging paths between hearts.
And, later on: our only wealth / is the abundance of sunrises / the deep laughter / in their eyes. Drawing from both his multidisciplinary practice and his desire to share with others, Picard-Sioui builds bridges between readers from Wendake and elsewhere. His writing sheds light on his origins, his beliefs, his advocacy work. But, more than anything, he shows us what it is to be human.
Le ciel de la basse-ville
Chosen by Alexandra Mignault
Michel Pleau is a poet fully devoted to poetry. He is from Quebec City’s Saint-Sauveur neighbourhood, a working-class area of the city that he loves deeply, and that figures prominently in his work. For Pleau, he was “born into the world” in Saint-Sauveur. Indeed, as he states in an interview with the literary journal Les libraires, “it was in this neighbourhood that I heard my first words, and touched my first light. These are my origins.”
Pleau’s poetry often features Saint-Sauveur, such as in Le ciel de la basse-ville, where he reminisces about his birthplace, nostalgically recalling the skies of his childhood. For the poet, a vibrantly glowing sky can console, and bear witness to both the present moment and the passage of time: So early this morning / rue saint-vallier at parc durocher / time rises within me / like a fragile pane of glass / where fragrances and passers-by / raucously collide. This is a place to be lived in, whether in reality or in poetry. And, for Pleau, it is also a way of understanding the world.
Au nord de ma mémoire
Chosen by Ariane Lehoux.
Mattia Scarpulla is an Italian writer based in Quebec City. In his recent collection, Au nord de ma mémoire, he explores identity, migration, and the relationship to the body. Scarpulla’s poems speak to the forgetting and remembering of both the self and the other, and to the resistance and abandonment inherent to all changing paths. His “childadult” characters are from many backgrounds, and their bodies undergo many kinds suffering, disfiguration, dismemberment, erasure, and marking. Scarpulla himself also appears in these poems, inhabiting places and non-places alike. Indeed, the book features several well-known Quebec City reference-points, such as the Saint-Charles River, the 800 city transit bus, and the terrasse of the Château Frontenac. From this terrasse to another, in Turin, the speaker of these poems recalls a promised kiss, with the narrative culminating in a moment of deathly silence shared with the beloved: Ghosts are condemned to remember all—too much memory is much worse than forgetting.