Ten Years of Healing Words for a Fracturing World

A debut collection ten years in the making: one poet's reckoning with breakdown, grief, and the long work of coming home to himself. Sébastien Prud'Homme spent a decade writing his way through crisis: the end of a skating dream, romances carried through Quebec's cityscapes and countryside, a psychiatric hospitalization, a one-way flight from Montreal to Vancouver, and the death of a close friend. Together these upheavals cracked his identity open. These poems are how he put it back together. Ten Years of Healing Words for a Fracturing World gathers nineteen poems, some drawn from real events and some imagined. They move outward from private ruptures: toward a wealthy city's indifference to its unhoused, the hatred and extremism of the present moment, and a night beneath the trees of Stanley Park. The book opens beside a fire with an Elder, wolves howling nearby, and closes floating in the immensity of the universe. Indigenous spirituality and the land beneath the city run through it: a fireside prophecy, powwows echoing through the rain, a shaman's ceremony, all met by a poet who writes, as he says in his own land acknowledgment, as a guest. Between them come ice rinks, cherry blossoms, atmospheric rivers, a villanelle, and imagery of mending (gold, solder, flame) in which scars are proof of survival rather than shame. These are poems that trust readers with real wreckage and still insist on tenderness. Prud'Homme writes directly about mental illness, homelessness, and inequality without losing his ear for image. "West Coast One-Way Flight" ends: Taking off in a corridor of light With collisions in my thoughts And bruises in my words For readers of confessional, lyric, narrative, and witness poetry, and anyone who has survived a breakdown, buried someone too young, felt different, or tried to build a self worth living in, this collection offers honest company. Sébastien Prud'Homme is a Québécois poet writing in English. This is his first book.