everyone rides the bus in a city of losers

Freure leads an unorthodox tour through his Montreal in a nostalgic, irreverent debut collection arranged according to the city’s metro. Simultaneously flaneur and commuter (“a young man with a notebook”), Freure brings fragments of time and place together in a profound record of lived experience. “I walked into suds bars and tap rooms. I played their VLTs,/ I sampled their eighteen beers, I listened to their patrons complain,” he writes. This is a geography of a living city whose multiple axes intersect downtown. “The mountain is not the city’s heart,” Freure explains; if anything is, it’s the transit system pulsing through both the city and the man. This is the quotidian, the minutiae of the unremarkable becoming remarkable in its singularity. Indeed, the collection’s title is a nod to a Margaret Thatcher quote, an ironic appropriation that reflects the confraternity of the man on the street, the man of the city. Montreal is Freure’s Paterson, and he knows the city’s music scenes, literary inheritance, seedy bars, and everything else: “I write their biographies in bric-a-brac, I am a preservationist,/ a curator in the museum of obsolete purchases.” Freure reveals the breathing city that, in many ways, is constituted of every one of its denizens. (Sept.)