Description: "This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's exuberantly lyrical collection, entitled in English Distantly, is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate series drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman's observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world. The cities of the individual poem titles are evocatively conjured rather than realistically described. Taken together, these poems distill postmodern urban life through their sharp flash sketches of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and shared struggles for survival and intimacy. Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real"--
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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