White Piano

(Paperback)

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Description

"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world." Le Devoir

Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie."

Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.

Reviews

"White Piano is another masterful collaboration [by Brossard and translators Robert Majzels and Erin Moure], the language by turns powerful and quivering ... and characterized by a transformative vitality ... At once achingly aware of mortality and hell-bound in its determination to press forward, change, and grow, White Piano is as brave as it is linguistically rich." - Quill and Quire "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 (on Notebook of Roses and Civilization) "[Brossard] writes with a poetic intensity that burns select lines and sometimes entire paragraphs into the reader's mind." - Montreal Gazette

Author Bio

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.