Review
'Brossard conflates writing with lovemaking – "at the hour of bedsheets or ink" – the poems forming a grammar of desire, like a diagrammed body ... The translation Brossard is obsessed with here is of a different sort, the translation of bodily memories, resurrecting old loves. For Brossard words cover the wounds, '"colours that precede / the iodine of words / torment of punctuation."' – The Believer
About the Author
Nicole Brossard has published more than thirty books. Recently translated into English are Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, Intimate Journal and Mobility of Light. She has won the Governor General’s Award twice for her poetry and in 2006 she received the Canada Council’s Molson Prize for lifetime achievement. Her collection Notebook of Roses and Civilization was shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. She lives in Montreal.
Robert Majzels, author of Apikoros Sleuth and City of Forgetting (Mercury), is a Montreal-born prose writer, playwright, translator and teacher; his first novel, Hellman’s Scrapbook (Cormorant), was hailed and acclaimed. His play This Night the Kapo won first prize in the Dorothy Silver Competition and the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. In 1991, his fiction was featured in Coming Attractions (Oberon); his translations include Anne Dandurand’s Small Souls Under Siege (Cormorant) and The Waiting Room (The Mercury Press), and France Daigle’s 1953 (House of Anansi). He has also translated several novels by France Daigle, short stories by Anne Dandurand and, with Erin Mouré, two books of poetry by Nicole Brossard. Robert Majzels lives in Quebec.
