In his review of Monica Bolduc's Dead End, Benoit Doyon-Gosselin notes that Acadian poetry is undergoing a “formidable renouvellement” [tremendous renewal] that relies in large part on the quality of authors from outside Moncton. He even speaks of a “revanche des régions” [revenge of the regions], referring to the poetry of Jonathan Roy, Sébastien Bérubé and Georgette LeBlanc, which highlights the regional spaces of Acadia. It is this idea of “revanche des regions” that is at the heart of this article through the study of the representation of the Madawaska region in the poetry of Sébastien Bérubé. Specifically, the paper explores how Bérubé’s region negotiates with a negative representation of regional space that is akin to the “complexe de Kalamazoo” [Kalamazoo complex] as defined by Pierre Nepveu. While the region may seem at first glance to be a gray place, lost in the “boucane du moulin” [mill’s smoke], emptied of human substance, Bérubé, through his poetry, seeks to fill this void to present a more accurate, more human image of the region.