Nicole Brossard, Sylvain Gallais, Cynthia Hogue Distantly

"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 seriesdrawn 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"--
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.”