Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes

Book excerpt: Poetry. Native American Studies. Translated from the French by Howard Scott. DO NOT ENTER MY SOUL IN YOUR SHOES is a poetry collection of great sensitivity. Above all it is a cry from the heart, as if empathy and poetry were dazzled by the eruption of a volcano. Natasha Kanape Fontaine reveals herself as a poet and Innu woman. She loves. She weeps. She shouts... to come into the world, again. The book is first of all a journey deep inside the self, with joy and love, taking the body on a path to expectation and ecstasy, a quest sustained by incisive, inventive writing, which can leap from impressions of nature to references to a Dali painting. The energy of the images and the power of this luminous, concise language amaze us."