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: a competitive figure skater's fall from the ice, a tender romance remembered in the golden light of Quebec autumns, a psychiatric hospitalization, a cross-country migration from Montreal to Vancouver, and the loss of a close friend - ruptures that, together, cracked his identity open and slowly put it back together. Ten Years of Healing Words for a Fracturing World gathers nineteen poems moving through these private ruptures - and outward, toward a wealthy city's indifference to its unhoused, the extremism and social fracture of the present moment, and a night spent in Stanley Park, feeling an Indigenous presence.

These are poems that trust readers with real wreckage and still insist on tenderness.

Kintsugi imagery threads through the book: broken things mended with gold, scars worn as proof of survival rather than shame. Blending lived experience with fiction, Prud'Homme writes plainly about mental illness, homelessness, wealth inequality, and a fracturing social order without losing his ear for image - ice rinks, cherry blossoms, wolf howls, atmospheric rivers.

Taking off in a corridor of light

With collisions in my thoughts

And bruises in my words

- the opening lines set the register for everything that follows. For readers of confessional, lyric, narrative, and witness poetry - anyone who has survived a breakdown, buried someone too young, or tried to build a self worth living in - this collection offers no easy comfort, only honest company. Ten Years of Healing Words for a Fracturing World is Sébastien Prud'Homme's first book.