you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

From poet Chantal Neveu, author of the award-winning collection This Radiant Life, comes a book-length poem that plunges us more deeply into the notion of the idyll and into the polyhedric structure of love.

you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.

Personal autonomy and the formation of “self” are nourished here by multiples—I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.

Praise for you

“Chantal Neveu moves to reappropriate writing on love, with precision and balance, and without evading the turmoil…. you is among the texts that quietly renew the relationship between poetry and intimacy.” —Adrien Meignan, Un dernier livre avant la fin du monde (tr. Erín Moure)

“Neveu’s writing sets aside all that might relate to articulation, coordination or subordination, so as to free up only what is indispensable via a fractioned speech.” —Monique Deland, Estuaire (tr. Erín Moure)

Press Coverage

Excerpt from you —Four Way Review

“Most of the lines in this book contain just a few words. Such minimalism is deceptive, though, as this very self-aware love poem performs fervor and excess on every page…What the speaker is preoccupied with is not an object of desire or even desire itself, but the prospects of their mind’s possible entanglements. Neveu’s poem is an experiment in observing oneself responding to love—she is drawn to the cerebral possibilities of being absorbed by another.” —Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Spring Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

New Poetry Titles (3/19/24) —Philly Poetry Chapbook Review

37 Poetry Collections to Watch For in Spring 2024 —CBC Books

“Each of the sixty‐four pages here lends crystalline power to single words as the form of the poem tends to work toward a word‐per‐line. The poem honours both each discrete mark and the surrounding absences (all of that space around the unit!) and thereby brings thing and void into exquisite relation. you encourages you to read it with something like a fevered but impressively measured tempo.” —Jake Kennedy, The Malahat Review