My Forests
By Hélène Dorion, translated by Susanna Lang
Book*hug Press, Oct. 1

In October, Toronto-based Book*hug Press is publishing Quebec author Hélène Dorion’s poetry collection My Forests, first published in 2021 by Éditions Bruno Doucey in France, in an English translation by U.S. translator Susanna Lang.

This collection, in which Dorion explores all facets of the forest – its beauty and vulnerabilities, and our deteriorated relationship with the natural world – is notable as the first book by a living woman and the first Quebec woman writer to be included on the high school curriculum in France as part of the Baccalaureate program.

Dorion, who splits her time between Montreal and the Eastern Townships in Quebec, is a prolific writer whose literary output ranges from poetry and fiction to essays, artists books, and a children’s book. She has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Le Prix Athanase-David, awarded by the Québec government for a body of work and contribution to Quebec literature, as well as numerous other prizes and honours in that province. Her work is well-regarded in France and internationally, winning various prizes including Le Prix Mallarmé poetry prize – the first Canadian to do so.

Despite nearly 40 published works (with translations in 15 languages), My Forests will be the third of Dorion’s books available in print in English: a bilingual poetry collection, Seizing: Places, was published in 2012 by Arc Publications in the U.K., and Book*hug Press also published a novel, Not Even the Sound of a River, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky, in 2024. (Two earlier selected poetry collections published by Guernica Editions and a meditation-as-novel published by Cormorant Books are no longer in print.)

In 2024, Book*hug co-publisher Hazel Millar met Susanna Lang at a translation conference in Milwaukee. Lang, who splits her time between Chicago and France, had come across Mes forêts at the annual Marché de la poésie in Paris when she was looking for a new project: a woman poet to translate. By the time she met Millar, she had already translated the entire collection and was looking for a home for the book. Dorion had hoped that Book•hug might consider the collection after publishing her novel, so the meeting was fortuitous.

Lang says she was drawn to “Dorion’s lyricism, and her deep connection to the forest. The poems are hymns of praise to the forest but also warnings of its fragility, which mirrors our collective fragility.”

Lang and Dorion worked closely on the translation. “I wanted to be true to her vision, and to do that in English language poetry that sang as her poems sing in French, though English does not have the same linguistic resources as French,” says Lang. “Hélène is very attentive to detail, so we passed drafts back and forth for as long as it took for both of us to be satisfied with the result.”

“[Dorion’s] work has a gravitas I do not always find in contemporary poetry, and that seems apt to the moment we are living.”

My Forests will be published in Book•hug’s Literature in Translation Series. Book*hug is one of a handful of Canadian trade publishers to maintain a dedicated imprint or series for translations, and adds four to five titles annually from Quebec authors as well as works from Scandinavia and elsewhere.

The stream

digs far into the earth
dismantles the mountain that bears down
with autumn’s entire weight
the curtain unravels
breathing hard
the stream sweeps the past
toward tomorrow
drags in its wake
the cold that gnaws at the hours

like a slight noise
deep in the soul
the stones carry
what we have kept quiet

“The stream” is excerpted from My Forests by Hélène Dorion, translated by Susanna Lang. Copyright 2021 © Hélène Dorion and 2026 © Susanna Lang. Published by Book*hug Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

My Forests publishes on Oct. 13.

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