A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization in 1899, he had already produced an impressive body of work. Translating Nelligan’s “essential” poems, along with a sharp introduction contextualizing his legacy as one of the “first poets to write openly about suicide, neurosis, and psychological breakdown,” Marc di Saverio has given us a rivetingly fresh version of Nelligan for a new generation.

Émile Nelligan was born in Montreal on Christmas eve, 1879. His first poem , Rêve fantastique was published in 1896 and for the next three years his poems appeared in local papers and journals. Following a series of public readings in 1899 he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He was confined to the Saint-Benoît Asylum where he remained for the next 25 years and then was transferred to the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital. Remarkably, all of Nelligans 107 poems were written when he was between the ages of 16 and 19. A pioneer of French-Canadian literature, Émile Nelligan died in 1941

.Marc di Saverio's is the author of a previous collection of poems, Sanitorium Songs (2010). His poems and translations have appeared in CNQ, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, and Partisan. In 2016, he was awarded the City of Hamilton Arts Award For Best Emerging Writer. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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Marc di Saverio hails from Hamilton, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in such outfits as The Dalhousie Review, Misunderstandings, The Toronto Quarterly, Modern Haiku, Haiku Scotland and Maisonneuve Magazine. He has published two chapbooks: Santorium Songs (Cactus Press, 2010) and The Sleeper in the Valley and Other Translations (Cactus Press, 2012). He is currently working on his first novel and his second book of poetry.

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