Distantly

This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's exuberantly lyrical collection, entitled in English Distantly, is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate seriesdrawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman's observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world. The cities of the individual poem titles are evocatively conjured rather than realistically described. Taken together, these poems distill postmodern urban life through their sharp flash sketches of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and shared struggles for survival and intimacy. Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real--