Shadow of the Living Brightness

Praise for One Dog Town:

‘Dominique Béchard’s debut from Gaspereau, One Dog Town, is emotionally powerful, striking me as a book entirely about despair with a lyric “I” oriented in a poetics of reflection, astute with sound and rendered into stanza structures that make the stuff seem as if cut from granite.’ – Shane Neilson, Canadian Literature

‘I just finished reading, and loved, Dominique Béchard’s debut collection One Dog Town. It feels, to me, as if Karen Solie’s thousand-yard prairie stare was distilled into an oak tree, being observed at 3am, alone, through a Northern Ontario window.’ – Douglas Walbourne-Gough, author of Island

‘The wilderness of Northern Ontario has deep roots in the Canadian settler psyche, especially in contrast to the urban landscapes of Toronto and Montreal. The poems in Dominique Béchard’s debut collection inhabit this territory, where “the mosquito’s kingdom of cool” and the “woodland noises” create “a solemn sense being / in catastrophe’s vicinity or way.” There is a Northern Ontario gothic sensibility that haunts the work in this collection where the timber wolf is a “sentinel / to what evaporates” and there is “dope keeping us young / until it doesn’t.” These are lovely, smart lyric poems of longing and loss, and are also a celebration of the difficulties of life. In their own complicated way, they are even poems of hope.’ – Jay Ruzeski, The Malahat Review

‘One Dog Town is a brilliant, brave, visionary, and deeply tender collection (in the etymological sense of an offering, and gentleness) that moves through bleak external landscapes and precarity to haunt with the speaker’s uncanny summoning of an animating figure: “willing you in a place beyond the mind.” The psychogeography of One Dog Town is at times a danse macabre, at other times a folk ditty or Springsteen paean to ineffable loneliness, and Béchard’s ability to delimit presence and absence with spatial metaphors through an impressive array of forms, is extraordinary. If these are poems of lamentation and leavetaking, they are also poems of arrival, of an arresting voice whose plainsongs of deferral, restraint, place-making, and solitude enlarge what it means to live and love.’ – Virginia Konchan, author of Requiem

Shadow of the Living Brightness is Dominique Bechard’s second collection. Her first, One Dog Town, came out with Gaspereau in 2019. She was a co-winner of the Frog Hollow Chapbook Contest in 2022 for Infinity Mirror. She has an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of New Brunswick. She currently lives in Windsor, where she works in publishing.