Distantly - Paperback

by Nicole Brossard (Author), Sylvain Gallais (Translator), Cynthia Hogue (Translator)

A bilingual collection of poems that offers a surreal perspective of urban experience.

This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's lyrical poetry is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates an intimate series of poems drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems comprise an evocative distillation of postmodern urban life with a sharp sense of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty and struggles for survival and intimacy. The poems capture the emotional and ecological surroundings of each city and its people. The cities in Brossard's poems feel surreal and in them dwell survivors of "misfortunes," living in urban landscapes with their "gleaming debris" and "bridges, ghats, / rivers in a time of peace and torture." These poems gesture toward a transmuted social context and toward a quest "to meet the horizon the day after the horizon."

Author Biography

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.