In a state of amazed observation, a woman tries to reunite the many parts of herself that are strewn across space… and time. But what is to be done with the ants and their tiny world, running everywhere and stirring all day long? What to do with the grass that keeps growing beneath her feet? And what about neglected scraps of days, tidal waves, barrels of fear, and imaginary memories?… How can one silence the noise of wars? “When one of my hands goes missing, I do not notice. […] It is a rare day when my whole body is with me. Most of the time, my pieces are widely scattered. A hand that writes, absent knees, an invisible back.”

A Thousand Pieces (Miettes de moi) received the 2010 prize for a first book of poetry from the Foundation L.A. Finances.

“Joanne Morency succeeds in transforming everyday objects, facts and gestures into vectors of poetry, revealing the strangeness they possess beneath their apparent familiarity. (…) She knows how to bring forth a form of paradoxical lyricism that Reverdy called “the lyricism of reality”: it expresses not only the interior life of the poet, but also his or her relationships with the surrounding world (…). In her own way, modest and personal, she contributes, discretely but efficiently, to this renewal of lyricism that has attracted many of our jury members.”
~ Michel Collot, Jury Member, Professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

“Reading Miettes de moi takes one into the gentle flow of a sensibility that requires intense and simultaneous contact with the thousand home ports of being.”
~ René Lafleur, Canadian Literature, no 106, 2010

Joanne Morency lives on the Gaspé Peninsula in eastern Quebec. She has published five poetry collections with Montréal’s Éditions Triptyque and two books of haibun (poetic prose and haiku) with Ottawa’s Éditions David. She has received several awards including the 2015 CBC poetry prize and the 2010 award for a first collection in Paris.