The figure of the father occupies a particularly significant place in Qu�b�coise literature--there's a real fascination with fathers, and this recurring persona populates fiction, films, and the stories people tell of their families and themselves.

Thus, it's not surprising that, as he witnessed his own father's frailty, Fran�ois Turcot--one of Quebec's most celebrated young literary voices--would write his own dedication to his vanished father, entitled My Dinosaur. In this, his first collection of poems to be published in English (and translated by renowned poet Er�n Moure), Turcot excavates, reconstructs, and pays tribute not just to the father, but also to the figure of the son, and to writing itself as key to story, emotion, memory, and history.

The dinosaur of My Dinosaur is that of the distant father, sought in mourning, by the son. With luminous and lucid writing, Turcot excavates the fossil gaze of his father, in an elated elegy composed of poems both tensed and open, minimalist and talkative, serious and droll, alternating the voice and writings of the father with the fictions and assemblies of the son--reminding us that a man's story can only be told by assembling the shreds and bits that we've accumulated over the course of our lives. As prolonged metaphor for all disappearances and for the endurance of memory, Turcot's meticulous assembly in My Dinosaur is a tribute to all our Dads.

Turcot's surprisingly light and wryly humorous poems will resonate deeply with readers who are inquisitive about the role of family and memory in the construction of identity and self. Scholars who are exploring literary work on grief, and anyone who has lost a parent and felt grief but also curiosity about their lives will connect with Turcot's reflections in My Dinosaur. And finally, fans of the poetics and translation practice of Er�n Moure will delight in this new work that has earned comparisons to Moure's own elegiac work in Kapusta (Anansi, 2015).

Montréal-based poet and teacher François Turcot is the author of Mon dinosaure (2014; finalist for the Prix du Festival de la poésie de Montréal), Cette maison n'est pas la mienne (2009; winner of the Prix Émile-Nelligan), Derriegrave;re les forêts (2008; finalist for the Prix Émile-Nelligan), and miniatures en pays perdu (2006). His poems can be found in English and French in New American Writing, Aufgabe, dANDelion, Action Yes, filling Station, Estuaire, and Exit, and his articles in the Cahiers littéraires Contre-jour. His poetry has been translated into English, German, and Polish. My Dinosaur is his first book translated into English.

Erín Moure is a Montréal poet and translator curious about what's active in the poetry of others. Moure's most recent books are Kapusta (2015) and Insecession, a biotranspoetics published in one volume with her translation from Galician of Chus Pato's biopoetics, Secession (BookThug, 2014). Other recent translations include White Piano (2013) by Nicole Brossard, translated with Robert Majzels from the French, and Galician Songs (2013) by Rosalía de Castro, translated from the Galician.

François Turcot's profile page

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erin Moure's profile page

“Assembled using a variety of materials (prose, verse, letters), Mon dinosaure catalogues a sort of Father-constellation, fragmented into several utterances of memories filtered by a type of poetry which weighs up its effects and fears boastfulness more than anything…. More than just a book on the father figure, Mon dinosaure highlights the essential share of fiction that fuels and shapes memory.” —Voir

“This kind of work is magnificent. Here’s a well-constructed book that not only offers itself the pleasure of speaking of the life beyond death, but establishes a dialogue between lost loves.” —Le Devoir

“Mon dinosaure offers a strong reading experience, Borgesian in a way, where form, robust and demanding, combines with content both humble and sensitive, hold up in an awareness of the volatility and memory of things.” —Lettres québécoises

“François Turcot speaks of the death of the father in Mon dinosaure, a singular book that opts for a poetic approach which is both stimulating and original.” —Voix et images

“Throughout this magnificent collection, we find fragments of memory that bring a father (the author’s) back to life. Oscillating between the shadows and the light, François Turcot presents his lines as though they were archaeological material and reminds us that (hi)story is made of fragments, which can only be told ‘shred by shred.’ The father has lost his diary he called his ‘Book of Hours,’ and so that’s what the son will try to piece back together. The result is both disturbing and brilliant.” —Radio-Canada/La librarie francophone