Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Untitled” by Joséphine Bacon, translated by Jessica Moore, from Uiesh / Somewhere (Talonbooks 2025), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

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Untitled

By Joséphine Bacon, translated by Jessica Moore

from Uiesh / Somewhere (Talonbooks 2025)

You speak of stars

I tell you about rivers

You speak of planets

I tell you about lakes

You speak of the infinite

I tell you about the tundra

You speak of angels

I tell you about the Northern Lights

You speak of the heavens

I tell you about the Land

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Copyright © Joséphine Bacon

From Uiesh / Somewhere (Talonbooks 2025), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

Joséphine Bacon is an Innu poet born in 1947 in Passamit, Nitassinan / Québec, and now living in Montréal. An icon of Québec literature, she writes in Innu-aimun and French, and has been invited to read her poems in many countries. She has also worked as a translator, community researcher, documentary filmmaker, curator, and songwriter.

Her poetry has won many awards, including the Indigenous Voices Award, the international Ostana Prize (for writers whose mother tongue is a language of limited diffusion), and the Prix des libraires du Québec, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

Jessica Moore is an author and an award-winning literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books) is a love letter to the dead. The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood) is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang and inherited grief. Jessica’s work-in-progress, Porous, is a memoir of motherhood and art.

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