My Dinosaur

There’s a fascination with fathers in Québécoise literature. Thus, it’s not surprising that, as he witnessed his own father’s growing frailty, François Turcot would write his own dedication to his vanished father. In his first collection of poems to be published in English, Turcot pays tribute not just to the father, but also the son, and to writing itself as key to story, emotion, and memory. With luminous, lucid writing, Turcot excavates the fossil gaze of his father in poems both tense 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 pieces that have been accumulated over the course of our lives. A prolonged metaphor for the endurance of memory, Turcot’s meticulous assembly in My Dinosaur is a tribute to all our Dads.