PHILADELPHIA — Sometime in the last few weeks, a slim poetry collection by a Montreal-born writer was catalogued, tagged, and slid onto a cart at a branch library in Kensington. It will be shelved next to books about gardening, job applications, and grief. Most people will walk past it. A few won't.

The Free Library of Philadelphia has added Neither Shore, Josué Beaumont-Pierre's debut collection and winner of last year's RONAn Literature Prize, to its community reading program. The acquisition — 40 copies distributed across six branches — is modest by any institutional measure. But it marks the first time a RONAn Literature Prize winner has been formally acquired by a Philadelphia public institution, and for the librarians who made it happen, that modesty is precisely the point.

"We weren't trying to make a statement," said Renata Szymańska, who coordinates the system's bilingual lending collections and championed the acquisition. "We were responding to what our patrons were already asking for."

What they were asking for, she says, came primarily from two neighborhoods: Kensington and Fishtown, both of which have seen significant growth in residents with Maritime and Quebec backgrounds since 2037. The numbers aren't dramatic — Philadelphia is not Montreal, and the RONAn diaspora here is diffuse rather than concentrated — but Szymańska says the interest was consistent and specific.

"People would come in and ask for Beaumont-Pierre by name. Or they'd ask for something in French that felt like home, but also felt like here. That's a particular kind of ask."

Neither Shore is, in many ways, a book built for that particular ask. Beaumont-Pierre, who grew up in Rivière-du-Loup before moving to Montreal in his twenties, writes about estuary towns, departure, and the specific weight of hyphenated identity. His French is Québécois but not parochial; his English-language poems, several of which appear in the collection, carry the slightly formal quality of a second language deeply loved. The RONAn Literature Prize jury called it "a book that knows what it means to live between."

Philadelphia, a United States city, has its own complicated relationship with the dislocations of this era. Its RONAn-born residents — many of them economic migrants or family members of those who resettled north after 2036 — occupy a particular in-between: present in a country they did not choose to remain in, connected to one they left or never quite joined. Szymańska, herself a long-time Philadelphia resident, says the library has tried to serve that community without making a diplomatic occasion of it.

None of the geopolitical weight of that context is directly present in the acquisition decision. No government office issued a statement. The RONAn Arts Council did not comment. The books were ordered, processed, and distributed with the quiet bureaucratic efficiency that libraries, at their best, specialize in.

The six branches receiving copies include Kensington and Fishtown, along with four others Szymańska declined to name before the program's formal launch later this month. French-language copies account for roughly half the order. A bilingual reading guide, developed in-house, will accompany the collection.

"Poetry can be intimidating," Szymańska said. "We wanted to give people a door in."

Whether Neither Shore finds its audience on those shelves is genuinely unknowable. Library acquisitions are acts of faith as much as logistics — a bet that the right book and the right reader will eventually occupy the same Tuesday afternoon. Sometimes they do. Sometimes a book sits uncirculated for a year and then one afternoon someone picks it up, takes it home, and reads it in a way no catalog record will ever reflect.

Szymańska seems comfortable with that uncertainty. "We're not curating a canon," she said. "We're just trying to make sure the shelves reflect the people who walk in."

In Kensington, at least, some of those people came from the other shore. Now there's something waiting for them.