Rue

Poetry. Bestseller, Drawn & Quarterly. Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, a finalist for the Fred Kerner Award (CAA), and a finalist for the 2016 Debut-litzer. In her compelling debut poetry collection, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. RUE takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank. In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street - RUE's poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated with neologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author's upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father's struggles with terminal brain cancer. Inspired by powerful Quebec talents like Nelly Arcan, Marie-Sissy Labreche, playwright Annick Lefebvre, Canadians poets Elizabeth Bachinsky, Nikki Reimer and David McGimpsey, Melissa Bull brings an unflinching new feminist voice to the Canadian literary scene. "Melissa Bull crashed my personal radar a few months back. I was reading a translation of Nelly Arcan's BURQA OF SKIN, glad to have been granted English access to one of Quebec's great modern writers, when it struck me that what I was reading didn't feel at all mediated. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that RUE (Anvil Press), the poetry debut by the translator in question, is such an assured work. "-Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette. "Loaded with grief and delight, with love and death, with sex and solitude, the world of Melissa Bull's poetry explores the abundance of human experience. In language that is both pla