In Coït, minimalist traces of language cling to a series of mapped channels. Every channel is a tenuous archive of choreographed gestures recorded by the poet from the edges of dance stages. Here, spaces hold words and words hold movement. A book marked by inexhaustible passages, this exquisite English language translation of Québécoise poet Chantal Neveu’s fourth book invites the reader to collaborate in the making of both texts and spaces. Here, Coït refers not only to coitus but to the act of moving in unison. Conceptual and intimate, Coït is a consensual experiment that exceeds the form of the book.

Chantal Neveu is a writer and an interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of the books Une Spectaculaire influence (2010), Coït (2010; translated into English by Angela Carr and published by BookThug in 2012), and mentale (2008). Her interdisciplinary textual projects include Èdres followed by Èdres | Dehors (2005) and Je suis venue faire l'amour, among others. A Spectacular Influence, translated by Nathanaël, is Neveu's second book to be published by BookThug. She lives in Montreal.

The (self-)translating author of more than twenty books, Nathanaël writes in English and in French. Her recent works include Sotto l'immagine (2014), Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012) and Asclepias: The Milkweeds (2015). Nathanaël's extrinsic translations include works by Danielle Collobert, Édouard Glissant, Hervé Guibert, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

Chantal Neveu's profile page

Poet and translator Angela Carr is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The Rose Concordance (2009), and several chapbooks, including Risk Accretions. Selections from her new work in progress, Here in There, have recently appeared in New American Writing, The Lana Turner Journal of Poetry and Opinion, and Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies. She has published and performed her work internationally. A doctoral student in Comparative Literary and Media Studies at the University of Montreal, Angela currently divides her time between Montreal and New York City. 

Angela Carr's profile page

“For the dancer to equal the dance is to restate the Aristotelean I = I. Chantal Neveu belies this blind equation by literalizing the pas de plus that both comprises and compromises the nothing and everything that makes us move. Transcribed from rehearsal talk—though there is no other kind—Coït is, like the bodies it casts, at once familiar, at once a surprise” —Vanessa Place

“This is that rare book of poetry that makes you want to give it to everyone you know, because it affirms that precise relation, that knowledge, as embodied, contingent on distance, ephemeral—an electrifying site of potentiality. Dear Chantal Neveu: thank you for returning us to our gestures, to the edges of our bodies, of language, our given prosceniums, ducts. Dear Angela Carr: thank you for affirming, via translation, a book that is so uncommonly generous… that affirms (like translation) the world with the world.” —Christian Hawkey

“This is that rare book of poetry that makes you want to give it to everyone you know, because it affirms that precise relation, that knowledge, as embodied, contingent on distance, ephemeral—an electrifying site of potentiality. Dear Chantal Neveu: thank you for returning us to our gestures, to the edges of our bodies, of language, our given prosceniums, ducts. Dear Angela Carr: thank you for affirming, via translation, a book that is so uncommonly generous… that affirms (like translation) the world with the world.” —Christian Hawkey

“For the dancer to equal the dance is to restate the Aristotelean I = I. Chantal Neveu belies this blind equation by literalizing the pas de plus that both comprises and compromises the nothing and everything that makes us move. Transcribed from rehearsal talk—though there is no other kind—Coït is, like the bodies it casts, at once familiar, at once a surprise” —Vanessa Place