 October
AUTHOR: Carolyn Marie Souaid ISBN: 0921833679
ABOUT THE BOOK: Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award, October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian historya time when army tanks, bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour. October spans three decades of Quebec life, chronicling one woman's attempt to forge some kind of reconciliation between the "warring" cultures, to find the common ground of the French and the English. It is a personal, unabashed look at her own marriage to a French Quebecer which finds her straddling two worlds, two cultures, two very different mentalities. From start to end, echoes of the October Crisis are carefully woven into the text, a constant reminder that the fractious past is never very far behind.
REVIEWS: "Not often are the divisions that beset and define our country played out in the work of a single poet. Carolyn Marie Souaid is a brave exception. Her tender, hurting poems show what can happen when family politics incarnate so much love, so much heartfelt pain." —Mark Abley
"Those who remember the stylish introspection and hushed elegance of Montrealer Carolyn Marie Souaid's debut, Swimming into the Light, will be surprised by her second collection, October. The memory of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte's murder (he was killed on October 10, 1970, by the FLQ) has darkened Souaid's voice far beyond its earlier, and quieter, elegiac stance. Many of these new poems possess the urgency of dispatches and are the more powerful for it. It's obvious that October depends on intuitive intensity rather than artfulness to press its arresting effects and in doing so the book seems to have secured for itself a certain emotional authority." —The Montreal Gazette Other
Signature titles by Carolyn Marie Souaid: |
SHORTLISTED
FOR THE A.M. KLEIN QWF POETRY AWARD
On October 10, 1970, at 6:30 pm, Quebec's
Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped outside of his Saint-Lambert
home by the Chenier Cell of a terrorist group known as the FLQ. One week
later, he was found dead in the trunk of a car.