"If We Dare To": Border Crossings in Erin Mouré’s O Cidadán

This essay explores the space of contact between languages–particularly that of French and English–within Erin Mouré’s recent collection of poetry, O Cidadán. The following discussion demonstrates the manner in which a tangible place for each language, without appropriating one into another, is created on the page. Drawing on the writings of Mary Louise Pratt and Jacques Derrida, I argue that instead of defining the language interaction, or translating one language into another, Mouré constructs a "contact zone" where deferring/differing spaces of language intersect and are made "visible" and are "touched."