Poets speak the unspeakable. Carole David's poems exude the smell of life in the raw. She excavates the human landscape. She goes for the jugular. Softly. David's literary heroes include Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, the Beat generation. Her early prose-poems are stark and questioning. They placed her outside the Quebec literary establishment. This translation finally makes her art accessible to a wider Anglo readership. The Place Where Your Soul Dwells, culled from her six books of poetry published between 1986 and 2005, cover a wide emotional territory. In stark, compressed language, the poet speaks of loss, memory, love, sex, suicide. Her characters struggle. They walk the edge. But through the pain, the words illuminate. Like crystal, they resonate.

Carole David was born in Montreal and earned a PhD in literary studies from the University of Sherbrooke. She has taught at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal and was head of the Public Lending Rights Program at the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2006, she was elected president of the Maison de la poésie de Montréal. David received the Prix Émile-Nelligan for Terroristes and in 1996 she was awarded the Terrasses Saint-Sulpice poetry prize by the magazine Estuaire for her poetry collection Abandons. Her novel Impala was a finalist for the Journal de Montréal prize and for the City of Montreal prize. La Maison d'Ophélie was on the shortlist for the Governor General's Award for French-language poetry in 1999. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 2011 for her collection Manuel de poétique à l'intention des jeunes filles; the same collection was also included on the shortlist for the Governor General's poetry award. In 2020 se was named the recipient of Quebec's Prix Athanase-David for lifetime achievement in literature.

Carole David's profile page

Nora Alleyn grew up in a bicultural family in Québec City. Following a B.A. in languages at McGill University, she joined the Department of External Affairs and lived in Europe and the Middle East. She studied translation at Laval, McGill and the Université de Montréal, and creative writing at the National University of Ireland (Galway), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (University of Vermont), Summer Film Institute (Massachussetts), and West Word (UBC).

Nora Alleyn's profile page

"Carole David, singular and plural... She combines story-telling with a great awareness of language. A rich and original body of work... that expresses the pain of being with intellectual and intuitive acuity. Carole David asks questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? Her work is marked by dualism: the poetic space and fictional elements." - Jean-Marc Desgent, Winner of the Governor General's French-Language Poetry Award for 2005 "Her voice is charged with America and transcendence, with memory, the present and metamorphosis." - Benoit Jutras, Lettres québécoises