Happy Book Birthday to you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure

Today, we’re celebrating the publication of you by Chantal Neveu, translated from French by Erín Moure. Join us in welcoming this beautiful and heartrending long poem about a love affair in all its stages, written in precise, intimate, and lush language.

Happy Book Birthday to you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure! In 2020, we published Chantal and Erín’s previous work, This Radiant Life, which was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the Nelson Ball Prize. Written with equal honesty and depth, you is conceived as a fractal of This Radiant Life. We also previously published two other poetry books by Chantal Neveu, including Coït, translated by Angela Carr, and A Spectacular Influence, translated by Nathanaël.

A focus on the relationship between change and attraction makes this long poem the perfect read for fans of Annie Ernaux and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station, I Lay Down and Wept.

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)

“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

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That’s all for now, dear reader. Please join us again in wishing a very Happy Book Birthday to you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure. Available now from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore. Happy reading!

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