Touch the Donkey : twenty-sixth issue,

The twenty-sixth issue is now available, with new poems by Tessa Bolsover, Jill Magi, Orchid Tierney, Amelia Does, Stan Rogal, katie o’brien, Chus Pato (trans. Erín Moure), Erín Moure and Lily Brown.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about.

Touch the Donkey : eighteenth issue,

The eighteenth issue is now available, with new poems by Ryan Eckes, Samuel Ace, Stephen Cain, Howie Good, Dani Spinosa, Rusty Morrison, Lupe Gómez (trans. Erín Moure), Allison Cardon and Jon Boisvert.


Seven dollars (includes shipping). It’s ultramodern, like living in the not-too-distant future!

TtD supplement #75 : seven questions for Erín Moure

Erín Moure’s 2017 new-old book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, edited and introduced by Shannon Maguire (Wesleyan U Press), marking forty years of poetry. In 2016, she published two translations, of François Turcot’s My Dinosaur (BookThug) and Chus Pato’s Flesh of Leviathan (Omnidawn). Two translations will appear in 2017, of Antón Lopo’s Distance of the Wolf: Biography of Uxío Novoneyra (Fondación Novoneyra, Galicia) and of Brazilian Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat Books, NY, fall). 2018 will see publication of her translation from Galician of Of Stubborn Dreams, by Uxío Novoneyra. Moure lives in Montreal.

Her poem “ferticule” appears in the twelfth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “ferticule.”

Well, it’s a fertile molecule, a poem small and fertile. As such, it has something to do with little theatres. Its refrain is a chant in which (as in the medieval cantigas de amor) there is no concrete image. The refrain is a movement from the interior, from the cells. It is small rhythm. At first, it is each time followed by concrete images, then becomes less concrete as the poem proceeds. Finally, even the words become unwords that do not articulate a universe we know. At the end, the last three words are real again, and concrete, if disparate: a chewed cud, the Spanish for “to heat up,” and the name in Polish of the southern city of Krakow or Cracow or Cracovie, a city with a long history in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the Habsburg monarchy, and, sadly, in the Second War, as the capital of the Nazi General Government for conquered territories in the East. Now it is a popular tourist city in Poland, and one of the most bustling cultural places in Europe.

“Ferticule” is a wondering about thinking or meaning, one that wonders by actually trying to think or mean, through chanting. The poem is thwarted, or indigestible, yes, but the chant remains. The thwarting could have to do with the poem being part of a work in progress called The Elements, which has to do with my Dad and is a book my Dad wanted to write with me about his own condition. I am trying not to write a sad story about dementia, where the metaphysics, and ontological base, of a “normal” person is set above those of someone whose brain is different. Rather, I am trying to receive that difference as equal, and let it enter the book on a more receptive footing, to see if this can help provide a ground, one ground, for hearing new epistemologies. My Dad died fairly suddenly, before he was able to work with me. But we spoke of it and he wanted me to do the work. He wanted lyric poetry, and there is plenty of that in the book. But there are also moments of destabilization, such as “ferticule”.

Q: As you say, this piece is part of a far larger work-in-progress. What is it about the larger project – whether book-length or multiple book-length – that appeals? One could ask how you moved to this from composing individual poems, but is there even such a thing as a poem that stands alone?

Actually, it might be said that I moved in The Elements from larger project to composing individual poems. One reason for the title of the work is that each poem is an element, is poem in and of itself. This includes the few longer poems in what I call linear sections, as well. The project is 104 pages, shorter than my other books.

Your last question resonates: I think all good poems refer and relate to poems that came before, and reach toward the poems of the future. But not only do poems not stand alone, I don’t think they “stand.” That’s an ableist word. Rather, I think they roll. They hold out words and sounds of the néant, and sometimes the real poem takes place between any one poem and another, in that space the poem/s open, forward and beside each other, and backward too. Translation makes time go backward by making poems in other languages contemporary to us; poetry can do that too.

Yet, to go back to the longer project: we read poems in books. In the end, I am always writing a “book,” I think. So. in that sense every poem or text has to contribute to the space of the book, to understanding what that space is and might be, and how it might change. The book is a wonderfully flexible mechanism! And it resonates, always, with other books, and with the books of the future.

Q: With over a dozen poetry titles going back some thirty-plus years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see yourself headed? I know you’ve a selected poems just published; was this an opportunity to look at more of an overview of your ongoing work, or is this something you already do? Or not at all?

At any given point, I am immersed in two or more writing projects, and two or three translation projects at different stages of completion; I read my contemporaries in Canada, the USA, and Galicia primarily; I’m immersed in the past—in 19th century Galicia, in 20th century Ukraine, in David Hume and Miguel de Cervantes to think about George Bowering, in Ionesco to think about stagings, in Rosalía de Castro to think about migration and precarity, etc. An overview of my own work? I am not sure if that is even a useful or possible thing for me; I just keep going. In the poems, Planetary Noise, it’s feisty poet, editor, and literary scholar Shannon Maguire who writes the introduction and provides the perspective, and who read all my books and proposed selections; she welcomed my thoughts and opinions, but it was her efforts made the book possible. I’m grateful for that, grateful that she turned her bright mind to the 40 years of my own work in poetry, and grateful too for her consultative process in deciding the contents and for her work with Wesleyan University Press, who have been tremendous.

As for where I see myself headed... same place as all of us: the ground, more or less. I’ll try to get a few more things done before then, writing included, translation included, and love and laugh too, and be there for my friends in times tough or glad, as they are there for me. Life is amazing and I want it to go on, of course. I’ve been very privileged to live in a peaceful part of the world, and to have basic health care, and to have had decent access to education, food, shelter all my life, and have neighbours of all origins and nations. I want to listen, too, and live long enough to see writing and possibility and future changed by younger writers, particularly Indigenous writers, as their thinking via their languages and traditional knowledge is going to be essential to all of us to make a future earth in which we and our children can thrive.

Q: Given you work on multiple projects concurrently, I’m curious as to the ways in which projects relate to each other. Do your multiple projects feed into each other, or are each deliberately constructed as an entirely separate thread? Are all of your projects – akin to bpNichol, for example, or even Robert Kroetsch and Dennis Cooley – individual elements of a single, ever-expanding canvas?

I don’t work as do bpNichol or Rachel Blau Duplessis, for example, with a single ongoing life project, as in The Martyrology or Drafts. In Shannon Maguire’s introduction to the Selected, she classifies my more recent production in terms of trilogies, which makes sense to me. So there are definite links. I did conceive of the first such trilogy as one: Search Procedures (the investigation of what it is to be a person and not just a human being), The Frame of a Book (or A Frame of the Book) (the investigation of what it is to relate as person to another person, a relation we call love), and O Cidadán (the investigation of what it is to relate as person to other multiple people we don’t even know, which is the citizen relation). Maybe what I am working on now, The Elements, forms a trilogy with Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots and The Rooming House, one of which will appear from New Star Books later this year, and one of which is still to be written. In working on any given project, avenues open up that can’t be explored as part of the project, either open up in the work at hand and get tangled with my life, or in the life at hand and get tangled with the work. I’d say the latter is the case for all three projects in my head at this moment. I also see translation of poetry as part of my work, as a contribution to the shared conversation that is poetry. Much of that sphere of my work is scarcely visible in Canada, as I translate poets who are from other nations, and there is no institutional support for that translation here. So my conversations tend to move into the USA and Europe, which is exciting, of course. It also has a great influence on my own poetry, though I do mourn the inability to converse more with my fellow Canadians on the challenges to poetic thinking that arise from working across languages and welcoming poetic voices from across our borders. I miss the chance to share that, so particularly welcome VerseFest’s invitation to Chus Pato in 2017.

Q: I’ve always preferred the idea that writing, generally, is a conversation. Over the course of your work, who do you feel you’ve been in conversation with? What writers are you speaking, or even responding to?

Probably more responding to than speaking to! Definitely in conversation with. Even with the dead for their whispers persist and converse with us still, being as we can only read all things as contemporaries, and with or against (warp or weft) our contemporaries. Diogenes Laertius, Lorca, Butler and Derrida on mourning and hospitality, Chus Pato, Eugen Ionescu, Francisco Cortegoso, Méndez Ferrín, Rosalía de Castro, Heinrich Böll in The Clown and Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Timothy Snyder on Eastern Europe, Aristotle, Cristina de Perreti on Derrida, Myung Mi Kim, Foucault on discourse and its structures, Lisa Robertson on the cinema and weather and the moment and the sentence we need, Christine Stewart’s upcoming project, Treaty 6 Diexis, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Oana Avasilichioaei, Phil Hall, Pam Dick, Uljana Wolf, Christian Hawkey, Gerald Edelman in the 1990s, CD Wright, Andrés Ajens, Guillermo Daghero, Jake Kennedy, Geneviève Robichaud, Chantal Neveu, François Turcot, Nicole Brossard, Robert Majzels, Norma Cole, Gertrude Stein, bpNichol, Caroline Bergvall, Nicole Markotic, Louis Cabri, Alice Notley, Barbara Guest, Fred Wah, the Quartermains, Margaret Christakos, Liz Howard, Louky Bersianik, France Théoret, Laura Mullen, Dom Denis, Calum Neill, Jordan Abel, Aisha Sasha John, Jacques Roubaud, Joan Didion, Winnie the Pooh, Gonzalo Hermo, Daphne Marlatt, Serhiy Zhadan, Yuri Izdryk, Roman Ivashkiv, St. Augustine, Allison Clay, Colin Browne, Yasemin Yildiz, Peter Kulchynski, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Blaser, Albert Camus, Thomas Merton, Mendinho, Luz Pozo García, Belén Martín Lucas, John Cage, Christa Wolf, Randall Jarrell, Mother Goose, Elisa Sampedrín, Carole Maso, Rachel Zolf, Renee Gladman, Claudia Rankine, Anthony Burnham, Immanuel Kant, Descartes, AM Klein, Ben Lerner, Luce Irigaray, Antón Lopo, Oriana Méndez, Harryette Mullen, Georges Perec, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Paul Celan, César Vallejo, Jerome Rothenberg, John Millington Synge, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Colette St-Hilaire, Angela Carr, Claudia Roden, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, Svetlana Alexievich, Al Purdy, Rosalía de Castro, Primo Levi, Phyllis Webb, George Bowering, Rilke, Philip Levine, Alice Notley, James Wright, Frank O’Hara, Vida Simon’s art, Pavel Yurov’s documentary theatre, and Bernard-Marie Koltès too, and Heiner Müller of course. And there’s not just writers! There’s art curators and commentators like Emeren García and Kim Fullerton, artists like Lani Maestro, Clive Holden, Vida Simon, translators like Lou Nelson, poet-translators. Plus my brothers, one of whom is a historian and the other an engineer.

Actually, I hate questions like this. I can’t answer them. My own work is a bit of blown pollen in a groundscape and seascape teeming and rich with the work of all these people and more... and older, Gilgamesh, and the dances in the streets of eastern villages at the beginning of village time... dances made to dispel death.

Q: One might suggest that your work has been an exploration of how the individual interacts with the group, from your work through the ‘citizen’ to the staged performances in and within Little Theatres. I also see a variety of other threads throughout your work, such as the poetry of both “witness” and “resistance.” Where do you see your work situated between these ideas? A blend of the two, or does that even miss the point?

I’d say the position of witness insofar as it interests me is always in a position of resistance. I’m a quiet person by nature and raise my own voice as witness when something troubles me to which I can’t assent. My work, I’d say, thinking here of the trilogy of Search Procedures, Frame of a/the Book, and O Cidadán, has tried to explore, despite censure or ego or other pressures, what it is to be a person and not just a human being, and this necessarily involves others. Not “the group,” I’d say, but others, the community of persons-not-ourselves with whom we share space and time but whom we do not know. Without this link of community and responsibility toward the other — which includes above all the responsiblity to resist genocides — we cannot fully be persons. We are humans, perhaps, but are slaves or self-colonized, I might say, by authorities and privileges that distort us to ourselves, and that in fact do not have our shared interests at heart.

As Bernard-Marie Koltès demonstrates in La Solitude dans les champs de coton, which I saw again last fall in Montreal at Théâtre Prospero, the situation in which we often find ourselves vis-à-vis others is that of commerce and not of exchange, and we are damaged by this. In the language of Koltès’s monologues (an influence, to be sure, when I was writing Kapusta), which is often compared to that of 18th century discourse, we see the origins and development of commerce and its entry into our bodies long before what we like to call late capitalism. That 18th century period coincides, as Foucault wrote, with the time when the modern notion of the “author” emerged (a restrictive notion, intended to shut down possible meanings, and a notion also based on commerce, not exchange).

But back to those three books from the 1990s and early 2000s. They triangulate the space of an Elgnairt Adumreb, the opposite of a Bermuda Triangle, in which our ships do not disappear but can float. It is inside that space where other flotation devices arose, like Little Theatres and O Cadoiro, my translations of Chus Pato and Rosalía de Castro, of Andrés Ajens and François Turcot, and then O Resplandor and into The Unmemntioable and Kapusta. Inside that space is the work of many other writers as well, and many thinkers and doers. I did not invent that space! I just mapped it provisionally, half stumbling into it, having already swallowed a lot of seawater, so I too could create there and breathe.

I don’t trust necessarily what is called the “poetry of witness” where the poet speaks for another (and, yes, since the 70s, this concept has been problematized and rewritten by many others). But I do believe the act of witness i.e. listening to the other and recognizing their right to space (I had written at first “giving them space” here, as if space were mine to give! yikes! the formations of our own neurons that prevent us from thinking!) by attempting the act of hospitality à la Lévinas —which is not to judge or to make the speaker conform to what we believe— is critical for poetry and thus for our future as thinking beings, as persons.

Q: I think you may have already answered a variation on this, but, finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

So many people, as I said before. In sixty-two years, it couldn’t be otherwise! And works I can’t help returning to are likewise many, and depend on what it is at the moment that I can’t help. But today, were I losing my faith in poetry? There is so much clamour in poetry, and sometimes there is joy in the variety, and sometimes there are too many words of poets and poetry seems a vulgarity I could part with. If this happened right now, I’d read touch and smell: Barbara Guest’s Fair Realism, César Vallejo’s Complete Poetry (tr. Clayton Eschleman). Late Paul Celan, in the Joris translations. Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings. Norma Cole’s My Bird Book. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, George Bowering’s rocky mountain foot, Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers. Phyllis Webb’s Water and Light, Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes sur le geste.” Lorca’s Divan del Tamarit, Clarice Lispector’s Água viva. Lani Maestro’s Tulalá, Susan Howe’s That This. Andrés Ajens’s Æ. Michael Palmer’s “Série Baudelaire” (tr. Emmanuel Hocquard et Philippe Mikriammos). Chus Pato’s Carne de Leviatán and Secesión. Ingeborg Bachmann’s No sé de ningún mundo mejor (tr. Jan Pohl). Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine. Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth. Miklós Radnóti’s Tajtékos ég in all the translations. Between “cloudy” and “frothy”, how to choose! Neal McLeod’s current Facebook posts on the Cree language, which are poems. Gilgamesh, in the Gardiner translation from the Sîn-leqi-unninnī version. Os Eidos by Uxío Novoneyra. New poetry in Room Magazine by Marilyn Dumont. And those medieval Galician troubadours. Martín Codax! “Ondas domar de vigo.” I’ll let him have the last word...

Touch the Donkey : twelfth issue,

The twelfth issue is now available, with new poems by Gil McElroy, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure and Sarah Swan.



Seven dollars (includes shipping). Take a bow, sugar beet.

TtD supplement #57 : seven questions for François Turcot

Montreal poet François Turcot is the author of Mon dinosaure (Finalist, Montreal Poetry Festival Prize 2014), Cette maison n’est pas la mienne (Émile-Nelligan Prize 2009), Derrière les forêts (Finalist, Émile-Nelligan Prize 2008) and miniatures en pays perdu (2006), all from La Peuplade. His poems have appeared in English translations in Aufgabe, New American Writing, dandelion, Action Yes, filling Station and Lyrikline. My Dinosaur, translated by Erín Moure, appeared from BookThug in April 2016.

His poem “SOLID GROUND —SIXTH WHALEBONE,” translated by Erín Moure, appears in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “SOLID GROUND —SIXTH WHALEBONE.”

A: In the poem Sixth Whalebone, from My Dinosaur, there is a passage where the father has run aground on a beach, swallowed by the sun. It follows scenes of a shipwreck and a windstorm. In this scene, the father seems dead, lying under the sun. This poem appears just before the end of the book, and speaks again of a disappearance. Here, the weight of memory of a father is heavy, like the whale, like the dinosaur. Both animal metaphors are gigantic, childish and excessive. The dinosaur of the book is at the same time the father, my own father, a man from another epoch whom I try to reassemble, and the absent figure of an animal bigger than nature who fascinates me. This animal has obviously faded, passed away, is no longer living but exists in representation, and that brings me immediately to my own father’s departure.

My Dinosaur is an excavation project, a research that digs around the father figure, whose story is that of a recent past. The whale appears in the last part of the book: here, seven whalebones, seven watery souvenirs of past summers are related. In them, my father, like an enormous mammal of the shallows, arises misunderstood, run aground, in small boats, under water or floating as my memory. I play here with the word “whale”, the cetacean of the depths – another icon of childhood (as the dinosaur of the title) that lets archaic images emerge. On another level, the “whales” refer also to the whalebone stays that stiffened his short collars, small plastic or metal lathes he kept in a small box – the Box of Whalebones stays. Two scales then collide together: the tiny whale, erased, those of the collars of my father that remind me of my memories, and the whale-father, obviously more heavy, the one who navigates in the dark depths of childhood waters.

Q: The structure of exploring childhood through a narrative surrounding the metaphor of the whale is an intriguing one. How does this work compare to your prior books? How does the composition of such a book usually begin?

A: In fact, the exploration of childhood using metaphors is rather recent in my work. I’ve only explored animal forms since My Dinosaur. But after that book, I became more fascinated by child’s play. I just finished a new collection of poems that is populated by many animals. I’ve dedicated the book to my daughter, to the ideas of memory flashes-before-memory, where the poem is a cross of micro-stories, fragments and prose. Dozens of animals punctuate this new project, appearing suddenly, becoming images and representations of fears, laughter, dread, desire, etc. But “animal presences” do not always appear in my first books, where it’s more the “family souvenirs” that I explore, trying to detect and follow the paths of memories.

And to answer your question, each of my books has a precise focal point, a specific subject: a night walk in the forest, a house history, a father, a child. These are the things that fascinate me. I investigate what lives close to me, by creating writing platforms related to family archaeologies. I like that a poetry book presents an architecture, one or many narrative veins, and the “excavations” that I propose in each project are linked to a quest after clues, which are collections of past traces, reconstructions... where the line between imagination and reality is thin. In a way, I follow trails to question memories and to structure them the trails become clear in the writing process. My books are then always related to a narrative deployment, as fiction can be. In this way, poetry becomes close to fiction.

Q: I’m curious about how My Dinosaur, as you say, is “an excavation project.” What first prompted you to explore your own childhood and history in such a way?

A: First, this book was conceived over few years: I spent a long time searching its axes, its voices, its pulsation. To tell the truth, I’d always promised myself that if I were someday able to “investigate,” to write about my father’s world, I’d do so. This Dinosaur, this enigmatic father, before being a book, was a pretext for collecting memories – mine first, his, and all those that I may have invented... I then started to conceive this “character”, because he was one, not just like a parent as seen by a child, but also like a hypothesis formed by a detective, by an archivist faced with disorder, an archeologist in front of too many approximations... And all this was conducted in angular ways, breaking with chronology, so as to get closer to his life.

To circumscribe a life is clearly impossible, for like any History, it can only be uncovered in fragments. It became obvious, in inventing stories of my dad (more than a hundred in My Dinosaur – both ordinary and extravagant) as well as accumulating them, that I would end up telling his story, or a story that seems to be him. To do this, I use lyric poems, fragments of letters, narrative pieces, prose or free variations, in verse form or not. 

And then, to avoid pathos, because it’s not always pertinent to hear about someone else’s father, to open up the reading a bit more, I played on biographic strategies, insisting on the anonymous aspect and the daily life of a man who could be or not be my father, especially in the Prehistories section, the heart of the project. I do think My Dinosaur as a book on the Father, but not only mine, for it points in many directions, targeting many epochs. This also creates, I hope, an alternation between distance and proximity in face of this man who could, despite his inimitable presence, be somebody else...

Q: After a small handful of books published over the past decade, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see yourself headed?

A: When I look at this decade, I clearly see a focussed movement – the more I write poetry, the more I commit myself. Here I think about both the nature of the topics covered and the way I consider or envisage lyric forms. What is sure is that I constantly search to elude and foil myself, to surprise myself and to place myself in “risky situations” where I explore a specific subject – sometimes a delicate one, with, I hope, an originality. Each of my books is then very different as much in the formal approach as in the architecture or purpose: they point at diverse directions, so that – when I put all my books in perspective, I can perceive the ensemble like a “small constellation”, where each book has its own motive.

And where I see myself  headed ? As I mentioned, narrative forms always interest me, so I will probably work on a “novel” over the next few years. I use the word novel, but let’s say a story. And poetry, of course! Also, my new book will be published this fall by Le Cormier (Belgium) and La Peuplade (Quebec). After that, even if I have intuitions, even if I try to imagine the next books, the future is a real riddle...

Q: I’m curious about your relationship to your works in translation. How close do you feel to a book of yours translated into another language?

A: So close... Erín Moure’s translation is clear, sensible, precise, rigorous and inventive. A real poïesis happens – as she mentioned herself in the postface entitled Si Moure traduit Turcot : a Book of Hours becomes a Book of Ours. Also, I had the chance to talk with her about the text, about some questions related to the lexicon, about the different perspectives. Our communication has always been open. I then read the English Dinosaur a few times and felt involved with the translation process. Erín always explained to me her decisions or ideas generously. I learned a lot from those discussions. Also, we both decided to include some pictures – an iconic dinosaur from the Calgary Zoo, and a photo montage of our Dads after the postface. Then, Jay MillAr and Hazel MillAr at BookThug welcomed those propositions and the photograph by Dianne Chisholm – the luminous and melancholic landscape for the cover. Because a book is a combination of details, all those elements make me feel very close to Erín Moure’s work. But, even given this strong feeling, obviously it’s always special when a dinosaur speaks another language...

Your question makes me think of this anecdote. Recently, a friend of mine told me that he really read his book for the first time in English translation. He said that it was maybe the only way to feel a real distance from his work. That’s interesting – the idea of suddenly becoming a new reader of your own book, discovering other strategies... I can understand this posture, but it’s hard to explain.

Q: What authors have influenced the ways in which you put a manuscript together?

A: Well, many, I guess. It really depends on the book I’m working on. Because reading and writing are feeding each other, my projects are influenced by different perspectives. In my previous three books, I thank authors that, for one reason or another, are related to my writing process. For Cette maison n’est pas la mienne, W.G. Sebald has been essential; for My Dinosaur, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, for his particular lyrical way of writing about the father – and Les heures, by Fernand Ouellette. I have to say that Erín Moure’s books have a very special place in my bookshelves, as well as others by many innovative writers who open spaces between literary genres, playing with possibilities.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Julien Gracq’s books have always reenergized me; W.G. Sebald’s prose and narratives strategies (the way he explores archives, history, etc.) have been a crucial influence on my relation with literature; Hervé Bouchard’s “fictions” that hover between novel, theatre and poetry excite me; and all the eclectic work of Daniel Canty – a close friend of mine – with his “unclassifiable practice” and his great translations of Charles Simic, Erín Moure, Stephanie Bolster and Michael Ondaatje. Also, obviously, there is the work of many Quebec poets whom I have been following for a while – Martine Audet, Gilles Cyr, Nicole Brossard, Pierre Nepveu, Roger des Roches, Elise Turcotte, to name a few. And so many talented younger Quebec poets around me, for sure... But it’s funny, to really answer your question, even though I write poetry, fiction and prose authors still occupy a central place in my reading habits. One thing is clear to me: all is in the manner of telling and being told...

Thank you, rob, for this interview.

François Turcot
Montreal – Magdalen Islands, 2016

Touch the Donkey : ninth issue,

The ninth issue is now available, with new poems by Stephen Collis, Laura Sims, Paul Zits, Eric Schmaltz, Gregory Betts, Anne Boyer, Sarah Cook and François Turcot (trans. Erín Moure).




Seven dollars (includes shipping). I'm here to provide the facts about sex in a frank and straightforward manner.