Description

<p><b>Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award<br>An on-the-scene report of a childhood abroad. A child’s vision of real-world events made real (and unreal) by the presence of his father.</b></p><p>Memories of snow falling on Quebec City’s copper roofs; scientists tracking the location of a sinking submarine near the Russian Coast. Children flipping bright kopeks at a dancing bear outside a flea market; a translator awaking from a suicide bombing with ears ringing, surrounded by destruction. A young boy watching his father report the news on TV as hostages hold wet handkerchiefs to their mouths, trying not to breathe too much.</p><p><i>Across the street, a red sun sets the windows of the Hotel Ukraina on fire. The tallest of Stalin’s seven sisters. We huddle on the couch in our pyjamas. My mother holding a remote in her lap. Static sky, bad reception. The TV clearing its throat. My father’s body, cut in half, moving up and down the screen.</i></p><p>This remarkably confident debut collection offers three long prose poems, each divided into 19 sections, fusing images of bucolic coastal summers, a father fixed by a television broadcast, and the colours of a Moscow winter with vividly depicted scenes of gunfire, media scrums, and live reporting. In this unusual hybrid of the personal and the historical, Dominque Bernier-Cormier tenders alternating perspectives on what is said, what is seen, and where the silence begins.</p>