Description
The woman speaking in these poems is speaking of the body. Though she has a body with a head, she has a head that fails to understand her body. She is a woman whose head understands a language, but one not shared by the man she loves or wants to love. Theirs is a love-hate story between two foreign tongues that have nothing in common but the flesh. A tale of bodily couplings outside language, outside the world, and out of time; linguistically, a tale of madness. Sex has shattered her sentences. Hers is the story of a woman undone, who has willingly offered herself, abdicated utterly and been utterly defeated, as perhaps all women have dreamed of doing. It is a story as old as the world and yet brand-new. Though out of her depth, even out of her mind, she has been able to hold onto her language, to regain its use. Once the man is gone, the eternal now of his caresses at last enters the past. End, deafness, and let speech arise. Gathering together the scatterings, mending body parts and parts of speech, the woman apostrophizes that 'foreign body' who, she says, opened her up like a book. For no reason, she says, or just to see what would be left without her head.
About the authors
Catherine Lalonde lives in Montreal. Her publications include Cassandre (2005), and Corps étranger (2008, winner of the Émile-Nelligan Award) and La dévoration des fées (2017), finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards. She works as a journalist for the Montreal daily Le Devoir.
Catherine Lalonde's profile page
Nora Alleyn grew up in a bicultural family in Québec City. Following a B.A. in languages at McGill University, she joined the Department of External Affairs and lived in Europe and the Middle East. She studied translation at Laval, McGill and the Université de Montréal, and creative writing at the National University of Ireland (Galway), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (University of Vermont), Summer Film Institute (Massachussetts), and West Word (UBC).
Other titles by
Other titles by
Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 11–20
William Lyon Mackenzie King / René Lévesque / Samuel de Champlain / John Grierson / Lucille Teasdale / Maurice Duplessis / David Thompson / Mazo de la Roche / Susanna Moodie / Gabrielle Roy
Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 16–20
Maurice Duplessis / David Thompson / Mazo de la Roche / Susanna Moodie / Gabrielle Roy
The Place Where Your Soul Dwells
Selected Poems
Human
To The Far Shore
Maurice Duplessis
Powerbroker, Politician