Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andr e Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers? The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"--her voice and her identity. Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself". Praise for Spawn "Like the image of time that passes too quickly, or not quickly enough, between frozen lake and beacon of hope, Gill's poetry wonderfully translates the struggles and perils of adolescence. This is a collection imbued with the poet's great sensitivity, emotionally strong and true." --Elizabeth Lord "Gill writes: 'we bathe in the malaise / of hot asphalt / waiting for a habitable word, ' and we feel the tension of translation, of using language at all, our doomed human technology. It's the hardest thing to capture that frustration in language, much less in translated language, and it's a little miraculous how well it's rendered throughout Gill's haunting lyric flares. Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf "Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving "the chalky veins" of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle. Miller's luminous translation gives us a poet who insists on unwinding layers of language--Indigenous and settler, pop-cultural, philosophical, and spiritual--in search of elemental connection." --Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood "Marie-Andr e Gill undertakes in Spawn a poetry of intimacy and estrangement in technicolor: evoking nostalgia for nature as well as Nintendo, her haunting juxtapositions exist in life cycles of commercial possibilities and ecological impossibilities, of postcolonial globalization and indigenous dislocation. Rendered into crystalline English by poet Kristen Renee Miller, Spawn is an unforgettable work of lyricism and cosmic intelligence." --Katrine ?gaard Jensen, tr. Third-Millenium Heart, winner of the 2018 National Translation Award

A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino) The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy. Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity.”

This book traces the remarkable journey of Hébert’s shifting authorial identity as versions of her work traveled through complex and contested linguistic and national terrain from the late 1950s until today. At the center of this exploration of Hébert’s work are the people who were inspired by her poetry to translate and more widely disseminate her poems to a wider audience. Exactly how did this one woman’s work travel so much farther than the vast majority of Québécois authors? Though the haunting quality of her art partly explains her wide appeal, her work would have never traveled so far without the effort of scores of passionately committed translators, editors, and archivists. Though the work of such “middle men” is seldom recognized, much less scrutinized as a factor in shaping the meaning and reach of an artist, in Herbert’s case, the process of translating Hébert’s poetry has left in its wake a number of archival and other paratextual resources that chronicle the individual acts of translation and their reception. Though the impact of translation, editions, and archival work has been largely ignored in studies of Canadian literary history, the treasure trove of such paratextual records in Hébert’s case allows us to better understand the reach of her work. More importantly, it provides insight into and raises critical questions about the textually mediated process of nation-building and literary canon formation.

The ocean has never had a biographer quite like Sue Goyette. Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette's days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life's overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean's importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard "Oh, Ocean!" versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean. In these linked poems, Goyette's offbeat cast of archetypes (fog merchants, lifeguards, poets, carpenters, mothers, daughters) pronounce absurd explanations to both common and uncommon occurrences in a tone that is part cautionary tale, part creation myth and part urban legend: how fog was responsible for marriages, and for in-laws; why running, suburbs and chairs were invented; what happens when you smoke the exhaust from a pride of children pretending to be lions. All the while, the anthropomorphized ocean nibbles hungrily at the shoreline of our understanding, refusing to explain its moods and winning every staring contest. "I wrote these poems," comments Goyette, "because I know very little about the ocean and yet rely on it like a mirror, a compass." In Ocean, Goyette demonstrates how a spirited, playful and richly mythopoetic engagement with the world can actually strengthen our grasp on its bigger truths. Winner of the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterwork Arts Award and finalist for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy. In a captivating narrative that spans the ages, from Charlemagne to Cirque du Soleil, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a language that has maintained its global influence despite the rise of English. As in any good story, The Story of French has spectacular failures, unexpected successes and bears traces of some of history's greatest figures: the tenacity of William the Conqueror, the staunchness of Cardinal Richelieu, and the endurance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Through this colorful history, Nadeau and Barlow illustrate how French acquired its own peculiar culture, revealing how the culture of the language spread among francophones the world over and yet remains curiously centered in Paris. In fact, French is not only thriving—it still has a surprisingly strong influence on other languages. As lively as it is fascinating, The Story of French challenges long held assumptions about French and shows why it is still the world's other global language.

This edition of Nelligan's poems, with a critical introduction by the editor and translator, is the first complete English translation of Nelligan's poetry authorized by the Emile Nelligan Foundation. With this book the editor hopes to persuade the reader that Emile Nelligan, "the most brilliant and original of the poets of the Ecole Littéraire of Montreal," was also the finest Canadian poet of the nineteenth century. In this view he is seconded by the American critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote: "The accepted idea [in Canada]. . . is that the poetry of English Canada is excellent and better than their fiction, and it irritates them to be told that the best Canadian poet was French."

Since the late 1960s Sheila Fischman has worked tirelessly at making the best works of Québécois literature available to English-language readers. Anglophones who have read works by Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Yves Beauchemin, François Gravel, Anne Hébert, Roch Carrier, and Marie-Claire Blais most likely know these works only through Fischman's subtly and faithfully crafted translations. In Translation celebrates Fischman's more than 150 book-length translations from French to English. It combines essays on the friendships created through translation with essays on the art of translation and on the changing context of literary translation in Canada. Distinguished contributors include Alberto Manguel, Commissioner of Official Languages Graham Fraser, authors Gaétan Soucy, Lise Bissonnette, and Louise Desjardins, and fellow-translators Lori Saint Martin, Michael Henry Heim, Luise von Flotow, and Kathy Mezei. The volume also includes interviews with Fischman and a selection of her prose. A fitting tribute to an outstanding career, In Translation illuminates the artistry behind a difficult craft by considering the work of one of its finest practitioners.