Kirjahaku

'Pleasure,' Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, 'is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.' This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Quebec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works - "Lovhers", "Ultra Sounds", "Museum of Bone and Water", "Notebook of Roses and Civilization" - along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

'Pleasure,' Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, 'is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.' This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Quebec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works - "Lovhers", "Ultra Sounds", 'Museum of Bone and Water", "Notebook of Roses and Civilization" - along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

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 alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers. Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking. Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

Available for the first time in more than fifteen years, this collection from celebrated poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard is a provocative investigation of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire.Nicole Brossard’s Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body — our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each “crazy” silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality. Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard — recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. The collection is now available in a handsome A List edition with a new introduction by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure.

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back. A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in "search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author." Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life. French Kiss: a celebration of the energy of women and language in the face of the male authorities of Montreal politics and the physical authority of the printed (and bound) word. The Blue Books collects these three long-out-of-print, groundbreaking Brossard titles, in their original Coach House Press English translations (A Book by Larry Shouldice, Turn of a Pang and French Kiss by the acclaimed Patricia Claxton). Don't be blue: these Brossard classics are back!

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.

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.

The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade -- in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning. Nicole Brossard, one of the world's foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure (Little Theatres) and Robert Majzels (Apikoros Sleuth) brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard's remarkable syntax and sensuality.

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Invited to a quiet Swiss chateau 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 Lotbiniere-Harwood, is a disquieting, dexterous and defiant missive, another triumph by one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

"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.

"[Nicole Brossard] is a wholly singular writer, part of a larger movement of Quebec 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, a "pause that transforms light and breath into language and threshold of fire." Since her first book appeared fifty years ago, Nicole Brossard has left us breathless, expanding our notion of poetry and its possibilities. Nicole Brossard is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published more than thirty books since 1965 that have been translated into several languages. She has received two Governor General's Awards for poetry, the Canada Council's Molson Prize, le Prix Athanase-David, and the prestigious Chevaliere de l'Ordre National du Quebec. She lives in Montreal, Quebec. Angela Carr is a poet and translator. Her most recent book is Here in There. Originally from Montreal, Quebec, she currently lives in New York City.

""On strands of light I am hanging poetry like garlands."" These first words of poetry from Nicole Brossard anticipate the vast body of work she has published in the last four decades. The poems in Mobility of Light were chosen by Louise H. Forsyth to elicit a sense of these whirling garlands and convey the intense energy - physical, creative, spiritual, erotic, imaginative, playful, ethical, and political - that has carried Brossard to a uniquely significant vision of the human spirit. Poems are presented in French and English on facing pages, underscoring the density of meaning in each word and line and highlighting the unusual rhythms in Brossard's originals and the extraordinary sonorities with which they beat. Some of the translations in this volume have been previously published, while others are new. In her afterword, Brossard talks about travelling back in time to discover how our most vivid sensations, emotions, and thoughts are nourished and transformed by our enigmatic relation to language.

Nicole Brossard is known internationally for her writings on writing, on feminism and on lesbian existence. This edition released for a new wave of feminist outrage is a book full of spirit, energy, insight and chutzpah (or maybe cheek). She is a major voice in contemporary literature with incisive and hard-hitting essays about feminist imagination and culture. I believe there's only one explanation for all of these texts: my desire and my will to understand patriarchal reality and how it works, not for its own sake but for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit. Years of anger, revolt, certitude and conviction are in The Aerial Letter, years of fighting against the screen which stands in the way of women's energy, identity and creativity. —Nicole Brossard