2023-09-04 13:26:38
In her first collection, “The Smell of Wet Stones”, the poet and performer offers a transgressive ode that refuses assignments to establish her own definitions.
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A tale of “geological lesbians” or a fictional dialogue on the politics of love: the poetry of Léa Rivière, published this summer in a first collection by Éditions du Commun – which definitely have a taste for magical texts – has this particular that it touches on all genres without affiliating with any. In a sense, she is queer without the author, previously published in a journal (PD review, among others), does not claim the term, preferring to exogenous assignments its own norm that one would have to seek among the variations in the woods or in the water that escapes our grasp. See with his poem “I am not trans in the forest”: “TRANS is the name of a hole. It is the name of a gap, a gap. […] It runs along me, it surrounds me, it rubs against me, it embraces me, it makes me shiver, it keeps me warm in the water of rivers in the spring, it moves on my surface, but it’s not me .”
Also a dancer and performer, on the initiative a few years ago of the Dance for plants collective, Léa Rivière thus offers a transgressive ode, whose material is a mycelial network of theoretical reflections on ecology, gender, sexuality or love desire. But no aphorisms here: rather a work of redefining minority discourses or of constructing other narrative horizons situated by poetic writing. Let us quote, this time “Municipal Love”, an imaginary conversation on the edge between the writings of Monique Wittig – one thinks of the Guérillères – and those of Marguerite Duras – Destroy, she says –: “She says, heterosexuality has nothing to see with straight people […], it’s just a beautiful name for the cognitive dissonance of treating the couple, marriage or romance as a relationship framework comparable to friendship or family when it’s just a kink, a sublime kink , it’s not a family tie, it’s ass. Its prosody, fluid like the ballet of the flames of a brazier, asks to plunge into it to soak up its perfume.
Léa Rivière, the smell of wet stones, ed. du Commun, 99 pages, 13 euros.
The extract
In the forest,
I am a thing that becomes other things, that dies
who sometimes sings a little, thinks a little, sometimes dances, sometimes cries, sometimes sleeps.
I have nothing to prove to the sylvan politicians.
We transition together.
The becoming of the world’s forest is a little more than a pile of biomass that allows a band of lovesick heterotrophs to breathe. It is perhaps, rather, a radical disidentification, by the roots.
I’m trans with you as long as you don’t live up to the friendship of the trees.
And I need you in my forest.
#Léa #Rivière #forest #dances #Liberation