"[Nicole Brossard] is a wholly singular writer, part of a larger movement of Québec Women's writing, part of feminist writing, avant-garde writing, part of lesbian writing, but wholly, unequivocally, herself."—Sina Queyras something like wait for mein the braille of scarstonight can i suggest a little punctuationcircle half-moon vertical line of astonishmenta pause that transformslight and breathinto 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 Chevalière de l'Ordre National du Québec. She lives in Montreal, Québec. Angela Carr is a poet and translator. Her most recent book is Here in There . Originally from Montreal, Québec, she currently lives in New York City.
First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike. This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book – Mauve, the horizon – is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original. Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.
"[L]yrical descriptions of lesbian desire coupled with a continued meditation on language. Brossard conflates writing with lovemaking […] the poems forming a grammar of desire, like a diagrammed body."— Kate Zambreno, The Believer "[T]he nearly hundred poems in Ardour appear as fragments, but their brevity belies their breadth. […] I feel saved by their intimacy, partly owing to their diminutive size: they feel like whispered truths, or at least consolations." — Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review 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.
"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.
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.