Sensual and compelling, the simple words of Nicole Brossard's writings slip in unexpected ways into readers' minds, all the better to transform their sense of self and reality. Creating tropes out of women's unspoken experiences, advanced science, literary and philosophical traditions, and the devastation of politics everywhere, she has been revolutionising concepts of human knowledge and being, challenging the assumed entitlement of those who abuse power for more than three decades. This collection offers unpublished poems by Brossard, extensive fragments of a conversation with her, and essays that critically appreciate many of her more than twenty collections of poetry, nine novels, and countless works of theory and commentary. Essays by Louise H. Forsyth, Karen S. McPherson, Alice A. Parker, Louise Dupré, Claudine Potvin, Katharine Conley, Catherine Campbell, Susan Knutson, Susan Holbrook, Barbara Godard, and Lynette Hunter.

Louise H. Forsyth has always loved performance and theatre. As an amateur lover of the stage, she has acted, sung, danced, written, directed, produced, translated, stage managed, served as props manager, and hung out as much as she could as spectator. Woven into an amateur obsession with theatre has been her professional life, where she wrote two theses on the classic French writer of theatrical comedy, Molière, taught courses and supervised theses in theatre, drama, and dramatic literature, wrote scholarly studies about French and Québec playwrights, and theorized about acting and dramatic writing. Her areas of academic specialization are feminist performance and dramaturgy in Québec. Along with her passion for what the women of Québec have written for theatre, she has been engaged for quite some time with developing theories of dramaturgy and acting au féminin, along with revealing the sources of tenacious sexism in the practices and conventions for doing theatre, for studying and evaluating it, and for recounting its history. In short, she has been wondering for quite some time why womenâ??s roles have tended to remain stereotypical in works for stage, TV and film, why theatre done by womenâ??when its perspective is explicitly derived from a womanâ??s point of viewâ??is still easily dismissed with a summary shrug as deserving only condescending scorn, why womenâ??s theatrical experimentation is so rarely discussed by scholars as serious theoretical work or used by them in their own theoretical reflections, and why the silence of critics on women and their richly creative activities has not yet been overcome when it comes to their accounts of theatre history.

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