Distantly

Reviews / Votes

"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 "To accompany Brossard in poetry through her many cities, in the marvelous English versions of Gallais and Hogue, is to be captivated again by the world we are always-almost-on the brink of losing or ruining. Her cities float before our eyes as desire incarnate, though she does not ignore that they are riddled with inequalities, contused by environmental degradation, jostled by misapprehensions, and just plain tired. Brossard's steady and generous gaze infuses joy despite adversity. Here, language itself penetrates beautifully to reanimate our contradictory love of the world. In her wide embrace of the cities that we inhabit, Brossard wills us toward better, toward recognizing each other's humanity enduringly, in an openness that brings distances closer, into the heart." -- Erin Moure, author of The Elements "'always I take up my cities again . . .' Uncommon sites, dreamscapes, distillations of experience as place; provocative, improvisatory, allusive, opening vistas both unexpected and deja vu: 'cities suspended above the hours' and 'cities really . . . with their mounds of women and stones"'-effluence of too much history. A cosmopolitan of interiority, Brossard creates meta-cities where the political lies down with the poetic, where distance lives in the lyric's eternal present tense. Distantly doesn't feel like translation, but like the discovery of a wholly original poet newly minted in English." -- Eleanor Wilner, author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2017