Keele Research Repository

This prose-poem is part of a larger critical-creative project on Montreal, which mixes memoir, feminist theory and literature. A key intertext is Nicole Brossard's French Kiss (1974), a celebration of language and desire. In Brossard’s counter-cultural novel, Marielle, also known as Elle, drives across Montreal from a French-speaking east side to an English-speaking west side and back again. As she does so, a francophone and anglophone woman engage in a lengthy kiss which is projected across urban space to a place and time outside or beyond patriarchy. Other moments see the women hang out with Marielle and two male friends, exploring and enjoying the pleasures of the city. My prose-poem is a tribute to Brossard’s novel, Montreal, and the feminist writer, Martine Delvaux, who lives in, and has written about, a neighbourhood featured in French Kiss.