Winter/Spring 2024 Poetry Preview: you by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure
We’re back with the second title in our Winter/Spring 2024 Poetry Preview: 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.
“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)
We’ve selected an excerpt from you to share today! you will be released on March 19, 2024, and is available for pre-order from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore.
first his breathing then his pupils
I watch his mouth
its furrows its swells
slight circle of his irises
from the dark hole a tube
he sees me
impulsion
an implicit programmatics
ascension
les façades le quartier
remanence of Rio
a yard a garden
the staircase
winding
its gradations
compelling
the maples
alongside
the black locusts
figuration of caresses
swirled rumour of a fountain
faint sound
metallic taste of the city
a magnetism
from palate to nostrils
infra-resonance
warm silver
low table
the flakes of fish
air under the studio ceiling
a loge
we make acquaintance
summer solstice alters the sky
we deflect curiosity by foreseeing questions
private
spheres
spontaneous revelation
the ineffable
freshness of a stream
are we already naked
bared
we expose ourselves
fluidity
gravity
propensity
the charm
the intimacy
premise of a banquet
Hephaistos
Aristophanes
vestiges Dionysiae vertigos
Empedocles
happiness
tenor of futures put to the test
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Chantal Neveu is the author of seven books of poetry, including you; La vie radieuse (This Radiant Life, winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize.; coït (Coït); Une spectaculaire influence (A Spectacular Influence); mentale; èdres; and Dans l’architecture (co-written with Nicolas Tardy). She has created numerous interdisciplinary literary works, in Canada and abroad. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies: Cyclages/Grupmuv, Espaces de savoir, Laboratoire parcellaire. She has held residencies at Maison de la poésie de Nantes (France), Passa Porta and Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), and Villa Waldberta (Germany). Neveu lives in Montreal.
Erín Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Most recent book: Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (2021) from Galician. Her translation of Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (2020) won the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation from French and the Nelson Ball Prize. Her latest book of poetry and biotext is Theophylline: an aporetic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké,
