Notebook of Roses and Civilization
About this ebook
Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Translation
The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning.
Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experiments with language and her groundbreaking treatment of desire and gender. This dextrous translation by the award-winning poets and translators Erin Moure and Robert Majzels brings into English, with great verve and sensitivity, Brossard’s remarkable syntax and sensuality.
‘[Brossard’s] use of elliptical formulations and syntactical hijackings creates tensions between the image and the statement that result in a style that is unmistakably hers.’
– La Presse
‘A new work by Brossard is an event – Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon is not merely experimental. It’s radical.’
– The Globe and Mail
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About the author
Nicole Brossard is a poet, novelist and essayist who has published more than thirty books since 1965, including These Our Mothers, Lovhers, Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. She co-founded La Barre du Jour and La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, two important literary journals in Quebec. She has won two Governor General's Awards for poetry, as well as le Prix Athanase-David and the Canada Council's Molson Prize. Her work has been translated into several languages. She lives in Montreal.
Robert Majzels is a novelist, poet, playwright and translator. He is the author of the full-length play This Night the Kapo (Playwrights Canada Press), and four novels, most recently Apikoros Sleuth (The Mercury Press, 2004) and The Humbugs Diet (The Mercury Press, 2007).
