Good news for everybody who appreciated the text published in my catalogue Sanctuaires. The author, Jean-Marc Desgent, is releasing his first book translated in english at Guernica Editions, entitled Twentieth Centuries. The original french version of this book, Vintièmes siècles, won an impressive amount of poetry prizes in Québec and Canada when it was released in 2005. Among these literary achievements, the most important one is the Canadian Governor General's Award in poetry. You may order the book from amazon, click here. If you would like to read the catalogue's text, please visit my website and click under "Essays".
"This is a brilliant work, troubling and cruel. Writing in the first person, Jean-Marc Desgent, presents an 'I' that encompasses in one swoop of desiring, childhood, centuries past and future along with vengence and tenderness in all their forms. With its profound lucidity, this book carries the world and its pain within its pages. And the tensions of our twentieth centuries."
-Daniel Sloate
"Jean-Marc Desgent's poetic works are among the most brilliantly original and profoundly prophetic examples of contemporary Quebec poetry."
- François Paré
"Reading Jean-Marc Desgent is to follow a poet to the far reaches of being. And when one returns, one returns transfigures."
- Andrée Proulx
"The poetic territory here is one of phantom miracles in which writing, radical and free of constraints, allows the poet's vision to embrace without hesitation the dark heart of the world : 'I see way in the distance and my arms extend that far.' "
- Benoît Jutras