Overview

A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play-all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world. In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stphane Bouquet's Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.

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9781643621531

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Reviews

This collection of rueful, frank, breezily wanton love poems by a notable contemporary French poet has almost none of the hiccups and irregularities one expects from a translated work. (The original French isn't provided, so it's unclear what liberties Turner is taking, but whatever they are, she should keep taking them.) --David Orr, The New York Times In a flaneur-esque mode reminiscent of Jacques Prevert and Frank O'Hara, this poetry collection traces the ebb and flow of intimacy in contemporary gay life. --The New Yorker

"""Turner’s excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride.""—Publishers Weekly ""Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet—at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious—and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and narratives, he weaves an ever expanding schema of every day queer life. A life filled with eros and wonder and political awareness. Common Life is multivalent tour de force.""—Peter Gizzi ""Down-to-earth but with an eye on eternity, Common Life is full of delights—philosophical, sensual, and above all, convivial. Lindsay Turner’s English lights up Bouquet’s style with the suppleness of sunlight in Poussin—present, alert, yet poised to evanesce. This book asks what it means to live together, even in Arcadia, but its cache of lyric forms serves to test what might be perishable—art, the tongue that speaks, but never, it seems, love itself.""—Joyelle McSweeney"

"""Common Life, Lindsay Turner’s English rendition of Stéphane Bouquet’s La Vie commune (published in France in 2016), achieves something rare: an alignment between text and translation so seamless it seems to create a whole new object, neither original nor variant but a lustrous synthesis of sensibilities.”—Anahid Nersessian, NYRB ""Turner’s excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride.""—Publishers Weekly ""Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet—at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious—and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and narratives, he weaves an ever expanding schema of every day queer life. A life filled with eros and wonder and political awareness. Common Life is multivalent tour de force.""—Peter Gizzi ""Down-to-earth but with an eye on eternity, Common Life is full of delights—philosophical, sensual, and above all, convivial. Lindsay Turner’s English lights up Bouquet’s style with the suppleness of sunlight in Poussin—present, alert, yet poised to evanesce. This book asks what it means to live together, even in Arcadia, but its cache of lyric forms serves to test what might be perishable—art, the tongue that speaks, but never, it seems, love itself.""—Joyelle McSweeney"

Author Information

Stphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry, as well as essays on poetry. He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, as well as screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films, and short films, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French. He's also interested in performance arts and has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la danse in Paris and for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bouquet is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, and has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors. He holds an M.A. in economics from Universit Panthon-Sorbonne. Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the poetry chapbook Fortnights (forthcoming, Doublecross Press). Her translations from the French included books of poetry and philosophy by Stphane Bouquet, ric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Frdric Neyrat, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Richard Rechtman. She has twice received French Voices Grants for her translations. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds an A.B. from Harvard College, a Masters in cinema from the Universit Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. She lives in Denver, where she is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

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