Bock’s language crackles with the energy of a Quebecois folk song, impassioned and celebratory but also melancholy and cheekily ironic.
The New Yorker, on Atavisms

A young, floundering author meets Robert Baloney Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of one summer evening, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec’s Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poised to disappear without a trace. But as the blocked writer discovers, Lacerte might just be full of it.

Maxime Raymond Bock lives in Montreal, Quebec. Atavisms, his first book, won the Prix Adrienne-Choquette.

Pablo Strauss, who translated Atavisms, lives in Quebec City, Quebec.