'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 Quebec 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.

"Life Policy" - "Lit by the light of one lamp, with clarinet backdrop and ashtray, you pitch safety and comfortable Futures. Your neighborhood shows as you trace the map, ruffle the bills and conjure up scarcity. Everybody's doing it, you say, Hopeful. Take your big dreams, I say through the back door, no one here can sing fate or pick up that dime, anymore. We left crossroads back there with compromise, one nation two hundred miseries and all that commotion. Your dreams are just words like table salt. Me I know this year's moment will be 2 a.m., my life savings and one train ticket down the fault line."

'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 Quebec 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.