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,