Nicole Brossard

Museum of Bone and Water

Nicole Brossard's poems are a sensual, provocative exploration of who we are and what we desire.

Musée de l'os et de l'eau

Fences in breathing

Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon

Gail Scott

Louky Bersianik

Louise Cotnoir

Louise Duprø

France Thøoret

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, THEORY, A SUNDAY (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna's new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women's theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Theory, a Sunday

roman

Baroque d'aube

L'amèr, Ou, Le Chapitre Effrité

Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Melanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert.

Mauve Desert

Nicole Brossard's lucid, subversive and innovative work on language has influenced an entire generation of readers and writers. But three of her seminal works of postmodernism and feminism have been lost to us for years. The Blue Books brings them back. A Book: A novel about a novel; five characters in "search of a narrative, a narrative in search of an author." Brossard's first novel, and a key work in Canadian postmodernism. Turn of a Pang (Sold-out in French): Quebec's 1943 Conscription Crisis and the 1970 War Measures Act weave together to form the texture of a woman's life. French Kiss: a celebration of the energy of women and language in the face of the male authorities of Montreal politics and the physical authority of the printed (and bound) word. The Blue Books collects these three long-out-of-print, groundbreaking Brossard titles, in their original Coach House Press English translations (A Book by Larry Shouldice, Turn of a Pang and French Kiss by the acclaimed Patricia Claxton). Don't be blue: these Brossard classics are back!

The Blue Books

Award-winning poet Nicole Brossard interrogates the nature of subjectivity and articulates the unsayable, paying close attention to those transitory moments when passions lodge themselves in metaphor. The intimacy of writing and the body speak together here, for to be able to say requires trembling against the grain of the skin. This brilliant new translation by Erin Mour and Robert Majzels makes available in English the original, sparse, and highly evocative fragments of Installations, poems that trace and retrace the spiralling movement of language in its eroticism, its longing, and its excesses.

Installations

What characterizes women as a group is our colonized status. To be colonized is not to think for oneself, to think on behalf of "the other," to put one's emotions to work in service of "the other." In short, not to exist. Nicole Brossard is known internationally for her writings on writing, on feminism, and on lesbian existence. This edition released for a new wave of feminist outrage is a book full of spirit, energy, insight, and chutzpah. She is a major voice in contemporary literature with incisive and hard-hitting essays about feminist imagination and culture. I believe there's only one explanation for all of these texts: my desire and my will to understand patriarchal reality and how it works, not for its own sake but for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit. Years of anger, revolt, certitude, and conviction are in The Aerial Letter; years of fighting against the screen which stands in the way of women's energy, identity, and creativity. --Nicole Brossard

The Aerial Letter

"Baroque at Dawn" is a luminous, powerful novel by Nicole Brossard, one of Quebec's most influential writers. Obeying an affinity for the sea, writer Cybil Noland agrees to collaborate with oceanographer Occident DesRives and well-known photographer Irene Mage on a book recording the marvels of an undersea world that may not survive an age obsessed with technology. The three women fly together from Montreal to Buenos Aires and set sail. There, aboard ship, Cybil and the photographer are initiated to deep-sea diving through virtual reality, an exhilarating experience for one, frightening for the other. As the days pass, the various members of the expedition reveal telling traits, and Cybil engages with thought about the writer's inspiration for fictional characters. After the voyage, which comes to an alarming end, Cybil sets to work, haunted by questions and by the characters in a novel she has in progress, particularly the seductive young violinist La Sixtine. Moving gracefully between seascape and places as diverse as Rimouski, Buenos Aires, London, and Montreal, Brossard creates a rich world of uncertainties and paradoxes. The novel is vivid in its beauty as it shape-changes, and as the writer and the writer's creations - the characters - interact in an intricate dance. With the poet's ear and eye that have won her an international following, Brossard juxtaposes the commonplace with the startling, and human leaps of illogic with eternal truths. Is reality what we think it is? "Baroque at Dawn" is written in highly charged, sensuous prose, expertly translated by Patricia Claxton. It confirms Nicole Brossard's reputation as one of contemporary fiction's most intelligent, daring, and original writers.

Baroque at Dawn

Le désert mauve

La lettre aérienne

"A novel first published in French in 1982, 'Picture Theory' demonstrates Nicole Brossard's fiction théorique and her preoccupation with the difficulty of writing and reading woman. The title (taken from Wittgenstein) implies her reference to the hologram as a new pictorial model for woman; like the hologram which is intended to be read from an infinite number of changing conditions, Brossard's text abstracts the image of the feminine so that it can be read from all angles. Centred on four women, this novel of lesbian love moves from Curaçao to Montreal, from New York to Paris. Essentially, Picture Theory poses the question of what is a novel."--back cover.

Picture Theory

"Nicole Brossard is one of the outriders of fiction and poetry in North America. With her 'dangerous intensity, ' she continually shows us new paths into and out of the forest. As Jennifer Moxley says in her introduction, this book represents 'twenty years of daring'."--Michael Ondaatje

Selections

On strands of light I am hanging poetry like garlands. These first words of poetry from Nicole Brossard anticipate the vast body of work she has published in the last four decades. The poems in Mobility of Light were chosen by Louise Forsyth to elicit a sense of whirling garlands and convey the intense energy ... that has carried Brossard to a unique and significant vision of the human spirit. --Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

The Poetry of Nicole Brossard

Mobility of Light

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers. Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking. Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

A Nicole Brossard Reader

Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader

With tantalizing titles like “Only a Body to Measure Reality By,” “Process of a Yes that moves its energy,” “On Hell,” “Are my tears universal?” and “Margin for Manoeuverability,” Nicole Brossard's essays pull the reader into writing that is gentle, searching, and unflinching in its examination of ideas, issues, and life. The difficult line between reality and fiction, the question of writing in French or English, women authors, Djuna Barnes, strategies of lesbian writing, the sensuousness of language- these are among the topics approached and opened within Brossard's philosophy in Fluid Arguments. Containing texts created between 1981 and the present, this book offers the first collection of Nicole's work to include essays she wrote originally in English.

Nicole Brossard

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