Nicole Brossard: Selections (Volume 7)

“Pleasure,” Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, “is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.” This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Québec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works-Lovhers, Ultra Sounds, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of Roses and Civilization-along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

Literature & Fiction

Brossard, Nicole

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Baroque at Dawn is a luminous, powerful novel by Nicole Brossard, one of Quebec’s most influential writers.Obeying an affinity for the sea, writer Cybil Noland agrees to collaborate with oceanographer Occident DesRives and well-known photographer Irène Mage on a book recording the marvels of an undersea world that may not survive an age obsessed with technology. The three women fly together from Montreal to Buenos Aires and set sail. There, aboard ship, Cybil and the photographer are initiated to deep-sea diving through virtual reality, an exhilarating experience for one, frightening for the other. As the days pass, the various members of the expedition reveal telling traits, and Cybil engages with thought about the writer’s inspiration for fictional characters. After the voyage, which comes to an alarming end, Cybil sets to work, haunted by questions and by the characters in a novel she has in progress, particularly the seductive young violinist La Sixtine.Moving gracefully between seascape and places as diverse as Rimouski, Buenos Aires, London, and Montreal, Brossard creates a rich world of uncertainties and paradoxes. The novel is vivid in its beauty as it shape-changes, and as the writer and the writer’s creations – the characters – interact in an intricate dance. With the poet’s ear and eye that have won her an international following, Brossard juxtaposes the commonplace with the startling, and human leaps of illogic with eternal truths. Is reality what we think it is?Baroque at Dawn is written in highly charged, sensuous prose, expertly translated by Patricia Claxton. It confirms Nicole Brossard’s reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most intelligent, daring, and original writers.

Baroque at Dawn

MCCLELLAND STEWART

Mauve Desert is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, 15-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother’s lover Lorna in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book – Mauve, the Horizon – is Laures’ eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original. Nicole Brossard’s writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic.

Mauve Desert

Contemporary

Nicole Brossard's fiction and poetry have been lauded as equal parts experimental and sensual, and Museum of Bone and Water continues this tradition. Drawing from Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges, this collection of poems investigates intimate bodily realms to probe questions of who we are and what we desire. Positing the body as a museum, the poems illuminate the human condition by way of fingers, lips, and organs, finding meaning in them as one might a painting. With writing that is lyrical yet grounded in reality, Brossard's poems have the capacity to speed the breath and quicken the heart, and make for a luxurious reminder that poetry can be as much a physical pleasure as a spiritual one.

Museum of Bone and Water

Poetry

House of Anansi Press

French Kiss, or: A Pang's Progress

Coach House Pr

These our mothers, or, The disintegrating chapter (Coach House Quebec translations)

Coach House Press

Surfaces of Sense (Quebec Translations Series)

Coach House Books

De Lotbiniere-Harwood, Susanne [Translator]

Literary

"Baroque at Dawn" is a luminous, powerful novel by Nicole Brossard, one of Quebec's most influential writers. Obeying an affinity for the sea, writer Cybil Noland agrees to collaborate with oceanographer Occident DesRives and well-known photographer Irene Mage on a book recording the marvels of an undersea world that may not survive an age obsessed with technology. The three women fly together from Montreal to Buenos Aires and set sail. There, aboard ship, Cybil and the photographer are initiated to deep-sea diving through virtual reality, an exhilarating experience for one, frightening for the other. As the days pass, the various members of the expedition reveal telling traits, and Cybil engages with thought about the writer's inspiration for fictional characters. After the voyage, which comes to an alarming end, Cybil sets to work, haunted by questions and by the characters in a novel she has in progress, particularly the seductive young violinist La Sixtine. Moving gracefully between seascape and places as diverse as Rimouski, Buenos Aires, London, and Montreal, Brossard creates a rich world of uncertainties and paradoxes. The novel is vivid in its beauty as it shape-changes, and as the writer and the writer's creations - the characters - interact in an intricate dance. With the poet's ear and eye that have won her an international following, Brossard juxtaposes the commonplace with the startling, and human leaps of illogic with eternal truths. Is reality what we think it is? "Baroque at Dawn" is written in highly charged, sensuous prose, expertly translated by Patricia Claxton. It confirms Nicole Brossard's reputation as one of contemporary fiction's most intelligent, daring, and original writers.

LGBTQ+ Books

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Books by Brossard, Nicole