MONTREAL — By seven-thirty, every folding chair in the back half of Librairie du Passage was taken, and a dozen or so people had settled onto the floor between the shelves. The shop on Rue Saint-Denis had stacked copies of Neither Shore near the door — a precaution that, it turned out, fell well short of what was needed.

Josué Beaumont-Pierre arrived without ceremony, shook a few hands near the poetry section, and sat down in a wooden chair that looked borrowed from someone's kitchen. He opened the collection to a page near the middle and read first in French, then in English — the same poem twice, or almost the same poem, because as anyone who stayed for the discussion afterward came to understand, the two versions are not quite translations of each other.

"The river doesn't behave the same way in both languages," Beaumont-Pierre said, when a McGill student asked him to explain the divergence. "It's wider in French. More patient."

The crowd was the kind of mix that Montreal has become quietly known for since accession: francophone regulars who have shopped at Librairie du Passage for years, students from the university's anglophone and bilingual programs, and a small contingent of visitors from Vermont — four of them, by one count — who had made the trip specifically for the event. The room held approximately sixty people in total, and the conversation that followed the reading ran long enough that the shop's owner, Nadia Tremblay-Côté, eventually had to remind everyone, gently, that there was a bar two doors down if they wanted to continue.

Most of them did.

The reading was the latest stop on a quiet circuit that Beaumont-Pierre has been making through independent bookshops since winning the RONAn Literature Prize late last year. Neither Shore, published by Harbourlight Press, takes the St. Lawrence estuary as its central metaphor — a body of water claimed by neither shore. The collection moves between French and English not as a gesture of political balance but as a formal argument: that certain experiences require both languages to approach, and that the space between them is where the most interesting things happen.

Tremblay-Côté said this week that the shop's standing order for the collection sold through its first allocation within days of the reading. A second order has since been placed with Harbourlight. "We knew it would move," she said. "We just didn't know how fast."

The Montreal Arts Collective, which helped promote the event, called the evening "exactly the kind of thing Rue Saint-Denis was made for" — a characteristically modest assessment of what was, by any measure, a well-attended argument for what RONAn literary culture is becoming.