From poet Chantal Neveu, author of the award-winning collection This Radiant Life, comes a book-length poem that plunges us more deeply into the notion of the idyll and into the polyhedric structure of love.

you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.

Personal autonomy and the formation of “self” are nourished here by multiples—I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.

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

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erín Moure's profile page

"you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship."—Philly Poetry Chapbook Review

“Neveu's writing sets aside all that might relate to articulation, coordination or subordination, so as to free up only what is indispensable via a fractioned speech.” —Monique Deland, Estuaire (tr. Erín Moure)

"Chantal Neveu moves to reappropriate writing on love, with precision and balance, and without evading the turmoil.... you is among the texts that quietly renew the relationship between poetry and intimacy." —Adrien Meignan, Un dernier livre avant la fin du monde (tr. Erín Moure)

"Most of the lines in [you] contain just a few words. Such minimalism is deceptive, though, as this very self-aware love poem performs fervor and excess on every page."—Poetry Foundation