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The poems go two by two across facing pages, where they press against each other, connect, and go forth in a tremulous manifesto. The result is a syntactical vertigo poised above nothingness. The halves meet only in an instant, suggesting that the crux of poetry is the art of not quite touching.
We loved to surrender hardly located know
that we were the ruin
just juxtaposed bouquets
that each of us had a social hook
minimum tender
Anne Portugal lives and teaches in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous volumes of experimental poetry.
Translator Jean-Jacques Poucel is a scholar of French poetry and comparative poetics, and lives in Paris, France.
Jean-Jacques Poucel is a scholar of French poetry and comparative poetics. His first critical book, Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2006; he has also published poems (in READ, 2007, 2008, 2010), and co-edited two collections of critical essays, Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec (Yale French Studies, 105) and Constraint Writing I & II (Poetics Today, 30.4 [2009] & 31.1 [2010]). He co-coordinates the Whitney Humanity Center’s “Working Group in Contemporary Poetics” at Yale University, serves as a contributing editor for Drunken Boat, and is a member of Double Change, an international collective working with French and American poetry and its dissemination through translation and public readings. He has also translated prose and poetry by Sabine Macher, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Michel Espitalier, Sébastien Smirou, Rob Halpern, and Nancy Kuhl. His translation of Emmanuel Hocquard’s book Conditions of Light was published by La Presse in 2010.