Founded in January 1992, L’Oie de Cravan is a Montreal-based publishing house interested in poetry triggers of all sorts.

What does this mean? It means that we publish books that can’t be reduced to a simple category but all aim at triggering some inner mechanism; books that we don’t always understand but always admire. Books with a mystery, books with an edge that give us goose bumps. We publish books in French but also wordless books of insane visual poetry, books of lyrics by people like mike watt and also stuff like a nineteenth-century home-made absinth recipe book.

We care about things that are not spectacular, things that are almost invisible and hard to explain but that we hope will burn in you for a long, long time.

What is an Oie de Cravan? Our name has something to do with poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, with the amazing surrealist poet Louis Scutenaire, and even with the Arctic goose of Canada! Our name smells good and looks good. You, too, could be like our name — you just need to never ever buy one of our books. Because if you do, that’s it, you will be lost to this world. But what does this world know? Aesthetics and statics — you’re more alive than that!