ABOUT

My art practice interweaves various areas, including poetry, translation, photographic and moving image, sound, and performance. I often explore various means of translating between these areas, bringing aspects of one area into another as a way of putting pressure on the very meaning, conventions, structures, and genres of these fields. Some ideas I engage with include language as trace and resistance, polyglot and polyphonic poetics, phonotopes (intermediary spaces between words, sound and image), and transformation.

I regularly perform my work and give talks/presentations on poetics and translation in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe, and I was the founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in Montreal from 2004 to 2009. I was the 2009 Writer in Residence at Green College, UBC, Vancouver, the 2010-2011 Canadian Writer in Residence at Calgary University, the 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University, and am a 2023-2024 Rhizome Fellow along with Kaie Kellough.

For seventeen years, I have also worked as a literary and commercial translator from French to English, and have been providing manuscript consultation services for the last several years.


Collections of poetry include feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), which delves into the fissures and fractures of a public park; We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012, winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry), which steps through the beastfullness and foliage of language to compose debauched poetic tales about a child, a tyrant and a wolfbat; Expeditions of a Chimæra (co-authored with Erín Moure, BookThug, 2009), a collaborative, dialogic work on authorial experiments and translational impossibilities;  Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), a hybrid work on borders that includes colour photographs and translations of poet Paul Celan; and most recently, Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award), a collection of poetry, photographs, and audio works that explore the various meanings of track/tracking.

Literary translations include the poetry of Nobel-nominated, Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu, (Occupational Sickness, BuschekBooks, 2006) and Quebecois poet Louise Cotnoir (The Islands, Wolsak & Wynn, 2011), as well as the prose of Quebecois writers, including Suzanne Leblanc (The Thought House of Philippa, co-translated with Ingrid Pam Dick, BookThug, 2015), Daniel Canty (The United States of Wind, Talonbooks, 2015), Bertrand Laverdure (Readopolis, BookThug, 2017, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation), and Catherine Lalonde (The Faerie Devouring, Book*hug, 2018, winner of the QWF's Cole Foundation Prize for Translation).


Using Format