Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes

Translated from French by Howard Scott

Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes is a poetry collection of great sensitivity. Above all it is a cry from the heart, as if empathy and poetry were dazzled by the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu woman. She loves. She weeps. She shouts… to come into the world, again. The book is first of all a journey deep inside the self, with joy and love, taking the body on a path to expectation and ecstasy, a quest sustained by incisive, inventive writing, which can leap from impressions of nature to references to a Dali painting. The energy of the images and the power of this luminous, concise language amaze us.

AUTHOR

Howard Scott

Howard Scott was born in southwestern Ontario and moved to Quebec in 1975. His translation of “L’Euguélionne” by Louky Bersianik won the Governor General Literary Award in 1997. He has translated many poetry, fiction, and non-fiction titles, often in collaboration with Phyllis Aronoff. In 2001, they won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Award and in 2009 they were shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Award. He is a past president of the Literary Translators Association of Canada. He lives in Montreal.

AUTHOR

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, born in 1991, is a slam poet, visual artist and indigenous rights activist. Innu of Pessamit community of the North Shore, she spent most of her life in urban areas, as did many other Aboriginal youth of her generation. Noticed first in Rimouski where she was studying, and at events in Montreal in spring 2012, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine is prominent on the provincial slam scene — she’s been dubbed the territorial slammer. She figures on Radio-Canada’s Plus on est de fou, plus on lit! list of ten young writers to watch. With an enduring commitment to the Idle No More movement, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine is part of the new generation of a people rising from the ashes, and who intends to take the place she deserves. She lives in Montreal.

Reviews

“A beautiful collection of poems that has the reader enter the Borean “countryside” and walk through it, almost spiritually, and brings us to very roots of a tradition that reunites the dead and living, and with it, the burning ancestral memories that provide a possibility of endless secrets of stones and matter.” –Hugues Corriveau, Le Devoir

“Natasha Kanapé Fontaine speaks of blades, vertebrae, back, nerves; she uses a whole lexicon of the skeleton that evokes the structure of the body, its frame, which supports it, which gives it its strength. A call to movement, her poetry is one of action rather than contemplation: we dance, we are walking, we are standing.” —Cousins de personnes (Paris)

“Natasha Kanapé Fontaine has written a book as pure as a diamond taken from coal, like the first sentence uttered after awakening from being drunk the night before. She has succeeded, in these deeply moving pages, to begin to ask the fundamental questions of origins, beauty, death and the passage of time.” –Maxime Catellier, Le Libraire (Quebec)

“A short dream on paper, [Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes is] the liberty that follows the deep feelings of the tundra, the gratitude towards this great land, and it is a confession of humility in front of its reality. […] This language of the earth and the sky, this vocabulary of wildlife and “flora”, these thrills of ice and fire show that the poem is born in a fusion of this elementary being and with a prelude of offering and pardon.” –Rachel Leclerc, Lettres québécoises