Foreign Body

By Catherine Lalonde

Write, whores! Write, mothers! Write, you victims of rape! Write, the pilferers and the pilfered! Let words fill up the spaces of women’s ancestral silence, of women’s cosmic silence. Catherine Lalonde’s driven, drunken poetic utterance lends a voice to dark realms that have been wordless since time immemorial. {Nancy Huston}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781550713763

Book preview

FOREIGN BODY

ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 189

Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council

for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through

the National Translation Program for Book Publishing

for our translation activities.

CATHERINE LALONDE

FOREIGN BODY

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

BY NORA ALLEYN

GUERNICA

TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.)

2011

Original title: Corps étranger

Copyright © 2008, Éditions Québec Amérique Inc.

Translation © 2011, Nora Alleyn and Guernica Editions Inc.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of

the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

Antonio D’Alfonso, editor

Guernica Editions Inc.

P.O. Box 117, Station P, Toronto (ON), Canada M5S 2S6

2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

Distributors:

University of Toronto Press Distribution,

5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), CanadaM3H 5T8

Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills, High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

Small Press Distribution, 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1409

Typesetting by Antonio D’Alfonso

First edition.

Printed in Canada.

Legal Deposit — Third Quarter

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011930803

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lalonde, Catherine, 1974-

[Corps étranger. English]

Foreignbody / Catherine Lalonde;

translated from the French by Nora Alleyn.

(Essential poets series; 189)

Translation of: Corps étranger.

ISBN 978-1-55071-353-4 Paper

9781550713763 Epub

9781550713770 Mobi

I. Alleyn, Nora II. Title. III. Title: Corps

étranger. English. IV. Series: Essential poets series; 189.

PS8573.A38345C6713 2012       C841’.54         C2011-904381-5

CONTENTS

PREFACE BY NANCY HUSTON

FOREIGN BODY

DREAMS

DREAMS

THE CHANT

FOREWORD

The woman speaking in these poems is speaking of the body. Though she has a body with a head, she has a head that fails to understand her body. She is a woman whose head understands a language, but one not shared by the man she loves or wants to love. Theirs is a love-hate story between two foreign tongues that