////// 284 pages
Size: 14.5 x 21 CM
978-1-915341-06-8
Recovery is an exhibition, an inquiry, a translative text. It seeks to vivify experience through a politics of gayness and an active demonstration of queerness. It engages with, in Marcel Mauss’s term, “techniques of the body,” from discrete gestures to athletic maneuvers and intimate caresses. By exploring weakness, it reshapes everyday actions and words into poetic acts of recovery.
The book begins in the diverse: Recovery is comprised of tracks (as in skiing, as in DJ-ing, as in walking) that readers are free to mix, to dance on, or to roam around in. Its prose, its poetry, its essays, and its translations are like method air. As in skateboarding, you are alone on your board, you ride the curbs, you jump the obstacles, you alley-oops (from the French “allez hop”), or you do darkslides, and yet you are never alone; you are doing it with other skateboarders. A painter painting alone in front of a cave looks like one of the rocks; onomatopoeias seem universal, but are not; a poem in Persian gets translated into a collaboration.
Recovery was published originally in France as Récupérer. This English edition, translated by Cole Swensen and augmented by texts written directly in English by the author and collaborators, has been transformed to adapt to this new context.
Vincent Broqua is a writer and translator. He and his heteronyms work with text, video and narrative as ways of entering the diverse, that special place between the unnamed and the named. He writes in French and English.
He teaches in the MA in Literary Creation at Paris 8, where he is a professor in North American Arts and literature. In 2000, he co-created the collective Double Change (doublechange.org), and in 2010 he co-founded the multilingual journal Quaderna (quaderna.org). With Abigail Lang and Olivier Brossard, he is also the co-curator of the Poets and Critics series. His book Photocall, projet d'attendrissement was awarded the 2021 Prize for gay novel/poetry in France. He performed his work in contexts such as the Segue Reading series in New York, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, the Poetry Library (London), at the Palais de Tokyo, the Maison de la poésie in Paris, the CipM in Marseille and various festivals in Europe. His work has appeared in The Chicago review, Jacket, Jacket2, How2, READ, Place, ...
Among his poetry publications:
La langue du garçon (Al dante/ Presses du réel, 2023), Recovery (trans. Cole Swensen, Pamenar Press, 2023), Photocall, projet d'attendrissement (Les petits matins, 2021 -- Prix du roman gay 2021 mention poésie), Frais du jour (L'Ours Blanc, 2020), Récupérer (Les petits matins, 2015), même = same (Contrat Maint, 2013), Given (roman pour s.) (Contrat Maint, 2009)
He translated a lot of poets, among whom: David Antin, Caroline Bergvall, Jen Bervin, Jim Dine, Thalia Field, Kevin Holden, Kevin Killian, Monica de la Torre, Alice Notley, Karen Sandhu, Layli Long Soldier, Tracie Morris, Redell Olsen, Jena Osman, Divya Victor, Anne Waldman, Marjorie Welish, Rosmarie Waldrop, Elizabeth Willis...