Humilis by Marie-Pascale Hardy
Using pliant forms and frugal, elusive acts of transformation, Marie-Pascale Hardy's writing intricately sculpts radiance from rock, elegantly crossing the threshold into the unyielding, yet bequeathing readers with a fresh dialect and an indelible encounter. They merge fundamental sincerity with entertained reality, culminating in an audacious openness and technical brilliance. humilis captures the essence of life with its mournful bitterness and unforeseen gleams of optimism.
PRAISE for humilis:
‘Following the most sinuous path’, humilis deviates in supple shapes through mind and matter, realising spare, subtle and often serene acts of metamorphosis.
— Sam Buchan-Watts, Path Through Wood
What you now have in front of you is a piece of light carved out of stone. Marie-Pascale Hardy’s writing is tender and delicate, and yet, or precisely because of that, it is able to gracefully cross the boundary into the cruel. Like fingers slightly grazing a wound. After abandoning this book (because one can never finish reading a book, but only momentarily desert it), the reader is left not only with a sense of having gained a new language, but also, an experience. Like that of hanging in a hammock; suspended from the ground and yet, irremediably haunted by it. What you now have in front of you is the image of a woman caught in sight just before kneeling down to pray, of a pen caught in sight just before falling to the page. Only such writing can be called “humble”, that is, magnificently truthful.
— Ramona de Jesús, Dos metros cuadrados de piel
Marie-Pascale Hardy’s humilis is an exciting and unsettling read. The poems are at once earnest and wryly self-aware; they offer dispatches from life lived without the armour of cynicism; they detail the ecstasy and suffering of the moment, as well the sly humour of hindsight. The poems dismantle many of the usual hierarches of desire, while they acknowledge how utterly we fall in love with other people – and lick our wounds privately – they also record an intense passion for the non-human, and offer lyric descriptions of being-in-the-world on the world’s terms as much as one’s own. The poems make linguistic fire from friction between the elemental and sardonic, between mystical integrity and the amused reality of everyday.
— Edward Doegar, For Now
In Marie-Pascale Hardy’s humilis, a kind of brazen vulnerability, technical bravura and a sheer depth of humanity – itself all the more moving for its matter-of-fact presentation – are woven together into an astonishing, visceral, and incredibly beautiful, debut collection.
— Ahren Warner, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled
A wind from the sunrise… preceding a storm? Shaping predilections of the hanging tree: leaves and thick tapering branches bend back to reveal a bandaged body. Lines from the chest, placed in the ground, will themselves to be scavenged; lasting impressions are shiny, birdlike. Loath to leave unsubtle markers on the plain, Marie-Pascale Hardy’s slender word-worms respect the dead silence with mutable signs.
— Sam Wilson Fletcher, New Adjacent Possible Empty Niche
There is a luminous, raw, almost physical quality to Hardy’s poetry. It is melancholic and bitter, but pulls you in swirling unexpectedly with hope.
— Sahar Delijani, Children Of The Jacaranda Tree
ABOUT Marie-Pascale Hardy:
Marie-Pascale Hardy is a visual artist, poet and musician. Born 1985 in Quebec, Canada, she lived in London for nearly a decade where she released eight albums as singer of electronic duo Paco Sala. In 2015 she moved to Berlin to dedicate herself to her writing, art and spiritual practice. Now lives in France. humilis is her debut collection.
Broken Sleep Books
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