The terminal illness and death of the author’s father and a recent trip to Egypt led Lola Lemire Tostevin to explore what she perceives to be the essential relation between language and death. In the hieroglyphs and carvings of ancient Egyptian temples she experienced how the bleakness of death and the desert were transformed into something that continues to live.
Of the writing of this book Tostevin writes, ““The journal entries of Cartouches were not written in the usual traditional diary form in which a day’s events are recorded. They were, like the poems, ‘fashioned’ as a process of writing through which the writer gives meaning to events that may (or may not) have happened. These events become hieroglyphs-iconic moments, if you will-framed within the pages of a book. They are small cartouches and amulets that help the writer define who she is.

Lola Lemire Tostevin is a bilingual Canadian writer who works mainly in English. She is the author of three novels, eight collections of poetry, numerous pieces of short fiction, and a collection of literary essays and criticism. She has translated into English the work of many writers, including Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Paule Thévenin, and she has translated into French Michael Ondaatje’s Elimination Dance. Her novel Frog Moon was translated into French and two of her collections of poetry, Color of Her Speech and ’sophie, were translated into Italian. Her most recent novel, The Other Sister, was published in the fall of 2008.Tostevin has taught creative writing at York University, Toronto, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, London. She is presently preparing a second collection of literary essays and is working on a series of short fictions.

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“Lola Lemire Tostevin is an incisive, intelligent, and sharply observant writer…
— Quarry

“Love, nape-tingling work.”
— Books in Canada