My Dinosaur

There's a real fascination with fathers in Québécoise literature, and this recurring persona populates fiction, films, and the stories people tell of their families and themselves. Thus, it's not surprising that, as he witnessed his own father's growing frailty, François Turcot-one of Quebec's most celebrated young literary voices-would write his own dedication to his vanished father, entitled My Dinosaur. In this, his first collection of poems to be published in English (and translated by renowned poet Erín Moure), Turcot pays tribute not just to the father, but also to the figure of the son, and to writing itself as key to story, emotion, memory, and history.

With luminous and lucid writing, Turcot excavates the fossil gaze of his father in an elated elegy composed of poems both tensed and open, minimalist and talkative, serious and droll, alternating the voice and writings of the father with the fictions and assemblies of the son-reminding us that a man's story can only be told by assembling the shreds and bits that have been accumulated over the course of our lives.

As a prolonged metaphor for the endurance of memory, Turcot's meticulous assembly in My Dinosaur is a tribute to all our Dads.