From Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scenes,
William Vallieres' first book, Versus, is a lyric bildungsroman filled
with portraits of seduction and infatuation, loneliness and buried
shame. What yesterday had fought to bud / Is stunted under ice today.
These are darkly canny poems about childhood, familial histories, lost
love and the weariness of spending one's being being / Everything I'm
against. Deftly crafted, intense and compact, with barbed insights
arrived at through verbal twists and syntactic half-turns, Vallieres'
voice is entirely his own.