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The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongsid...
"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world."—Le Devoir Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie." Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.
"This collection offers unpublished poems by Nicole Brossard, extensive fragments of a conversation with her, and essays that critically appreciate many of her more than twenty collections of poetry, nine novels, and countless works of theory and commentary."--BOOK JACKET.
"Nicole Brossard is one of the outriders of fiction and poetry in North America. With her 'dangerous intensity, ' she continually shows us new paths into and out of the forest. As Jennifer Moxley says in her introduction, this book represents 'twenty years of daring'."--Michael Ondaatje
This is the poetry by Nicole Brossard who has become well known as a lesbian feminist theorist and writer and as the leading figure among Quebec post-modernist writers. Her work blurs the boundaries between fiction and theory, subverting the fictions partriarchal discourse has spun about women's lives by working with the 're(her)alities' of women's lives that lie outside the codes of fiction.
Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Melanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert.
Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon. Will the strange intoxication that takes hold of her and her characters – sculptor Charles; his sister Kim, about to leave for the far north; and Laure Ravin, a lawyer obsessed with the Patriot Act – allow her to break through the darkness of the world? Fences in Breathing, first published and critically lauded in French as La capture du sombre, and now brought into English by the celebrated translator Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, is a disquieting, dexterous and defiant missive, another triumph by one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.
The first of renowned Quebecois poet and writer Nicole Brossard's uncategorizable books to be published in England, Typhon Dru is composed of two poem sequences: "La matiere harmonieuse manoeuvre encore" ("Harmonious Matter Still Manoeuvres"), a sequence of brief proses, and the title sequence, made up of short verse stanzas: "I pretend to bt watching in silence / in the galaxies' cold coral/ I pretend that if the eye is dark / it cannot keep watch"
Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk – about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing. When Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon appeared in French (as Hier), the media called it the pinnacle of Brossard’s remarkable forty-year literary career. From its intersection of four women emerges a kind of art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire and art.
"[Nicole Brossard] is a wholly singular writer, part of a larger movement of Québec Women's writing, part of feminist writing, avant-garde writing, part of lesbian writing, but wholly, unequivocally, herself."—Sina Queyras something like wait for me in the braille of scars tonight can i suggest a little punctuation circle half-moon vertical line of astonishment a pause that transforms light and breath into language and threshold of fire Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing within us is also a language of connection. In these poems, intimacy with the other is another astonishment—a pleasant gasp...