One evening in the fall of 2003, I received a call from a young man who claimed to have in his possession a notebook that the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa would have kept during his stay in Montreal. I immediately told him that this seemed most unlikely, since Pessoa never le Lisbon, so to speak, once he had settled there for good. But the young man knew these facts, and he insisted anyway that I take a look at the notebook. I made an appointment to meet him the next day in a café near my house.

“Paul Bélanger’s project consists in manifesting his unconditional love for the Portuguese author. He achieves this by producing prose poetry, in Pessoa’s style, that rests between fiction and philosophy… The result is beautiful, effective, subtle, and stimulating. The texts encourage us to run back to and rollick in Pessoa’s original poems.”

~ Hugues Corriveau, Le Devoir

An award-winning poet whose poetic breath is as powerful as it is erudite, Paul Bélanger has published a dozen books of poems and prose. Some of his books have appeared in translation. He taught creative writing at Université du Québec à Montréal, and was was publisher and editor for the Éditions du Noroît between 1991 and 2021. Paul Bélanger lives in Montreal.

Poet, novelist, essayist, translator, Antonio D’Alfonso has published more than fifty books (including translations) and has made five feature films. For his writings, he won the Trillium Award, the Bressani Award. In 2016, he received a Honorary Doctorate from Athabasca University. His new film, Tata (Daddy), was released in July 2020. The Two-Headed Man: Collected Poems 1970-2020 was published in July 2020.