Simone Weil: Songs of Hunger and Love

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

A recipient of the Gerald Lampert Award (1989), Sarah Klassen has seen
her work published and reviewed in literary journals across Canada. In
this, her fifth book of poems, she pays homage to Simone Weil, the
brilliant French philosopher, leftist, pacifist, and anti-fascist who,
at the age of 34, starved herself to death on a matter of principle in
1943. The poems speak of those who, though “born for felicity,” are
“condemned to wariness” and “the uncertain destinies / of absurd
journeys.” Weil’s rejection of institutionalized religion and belief
that thinking is a violent activity is reflected in the lines:
“thoughts of God / pour out like blood / through every nerve and
fibre, / through fingertips, pen, ink, into my notebook.” In this
moving, thoughtful, and startling collection, Klassen offers a perfect
example of what critics call “intertextuality”—intimate
relationships that can exist between writers or between writers and
readers.