Nicole Brossard has published over thirty books,
including Ardeur, Lointaines, Piano blanc, Lumière,
and fragment d’envers. In 2019, she was awarded the Lifetime
Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in
Poetry. Sylvain Gallais is emeritus professor of
economics at Université Francois Rabelais (Tours, France) and of
French in the School of International Letters and Culture at
Arizona State University. He is coauthor of France Encounters
Globalization. Cynthia Hogue is a translator,
poet, and the inaugural Marshall Chair in Poetry Emerita Professor
of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of
several books, most recently In June the Labyrinth.
“One of the most outstanding writers of her generation, known for
her feminist commitment and innovative aesthetics, Brossard here
turns her incisive imagination to cities, evoking them through
details that range from the austere to the flamboyant. And always
as lived: she shows them not as abstractions, but as extensions of
the people that live them, just as the people are, in turn,
constructions of the cities in which they live. Gallais and Hogue
capture all the complexity of Brossard's subtle implications and
slippery imagery in a translation that reads with the grace and
conviction of the original.”
*Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time*
“To accompany Brossard in poetry through her many cities, in the
marvelous English versions of Gallais and Hogue, is to be
captivated again by the world we are always—almost—on the brink of
losing or ruining. Her cities float before our eyes as desire
incarnate, though she does not ignore that they are riddled with
inequalities, contused by environmental degradation, jostled by
misapprehensions, and just plain tired. Brossard’s steady and
generous gaze infuses joy despite adversity. Here, language itself
penetrates beautifully to reanimate our contradictory love of the
world. In her wide embrace of the cities that we inhabit, Brossard
wills us toward better, toward recognizing each other’s humanity
enduringly, in an openness that brings distances closer, into the
heart.”
*Erin Moure, author of The Elements*
“’always I take up my cities again . . .’ Uncommon sites,
dreamscapes, distillations of experience as place; provocative,
improvisatory, allusive, opening vistas both unexpected and déjà
vu: ‘cities suspended above the hours’ and ‘cities really . . .
with their mounds of women and stones”’—effluence of too much
history. A cosmopolitan of interiority, Brossard creates
meta-cities where the political lies down with the poetic, where
distance lives in the lyric’s eternal present tense. Distantly
doesn’t feel like translation, but like the discovery of a wholly
original poet newly minted in English.”
*Eleanor Wilner, author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems
1975-2017*
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