When Denise Desautels traveled to Italy in 1988 to write about Michel Goulet’s art installations at the 43rd Venice Art Biennale, she brought with her the autobiographical themes to which she frequently returns in her writing: memory, childhood, mourning. As she circled Goulet’s sculptures and moved through the City of Masks, Desautels sought to look beyond their facades, exploring relationships between language, silence, place, and the self, much like Ingeborg Bachmann in Frankfort Lectures on Poetics (known as lessons in French). No one could have known, however, that a mass shooting at the École Polytechnique would soon send shockwaves through Montreal. Having begun as a reflection on art and objecthood, proximity and distance, truth and illusion, Lessons from Venice then turned into a moving tribute to the fourteen women killed by a misogynist gunman in the Montreal Massacre on December 6, 1989. Almost thirty years later, this work has gained even more urgency since its original publication. In an era when gun violence, hate crimes, and limitations on women’s rights threaten to appear banal in North America, Desautels’ poetry offers an act of resistance, a search for meaning, and a powerful expression of solidarity with all those who seek to come to grips with the past in the present.