Annie Lafleur is an important voice in Quebec poetry. His collections are the fruit of long gestations and always offer us immense inspiration. Ditto in Puberty, a book which goes back in time to his adolescence.
These poems form a lush jungle where plants and beasts collide, creating strong and raw verses in an incantatory language to postpone the arrival of adulthood. Annie is this “mutant”, described by her friend Menina, with her eyes wide open to a closed world who dreams by imagining the unimaginable.
You can reread Puberty 100 times and never find traces of juvenile acne in the same place on a face that “lies so well.” This look wipes away everything that seeks to ignore it “on a path that leads nowhere, in a city where you never arrive.” Always surprising, the images are all the more impactful. “I learned to read and write by the sound of my voice/the first cry by the cry of my naked mother.”
This flow of powerful words has something liberating, even jubilant. The poet has fun sometimes creating 12-foot verses without rhyme and graphic forms reminiscent of the visual arts. She whips our brains with great gusts of wind as she concludes: “It’s a party! »
