Conditions of Light: Elegies

Putting unprecedented pressure on the line break, Emmanuel Hocquard's obliquely interlaced poetic series cracks open the facade of language to let a little light through--the glimmers are beyond definition, explication, or even, in a certain way, expression, yet they are, nonetheless, there. Building on his decades of attention to Wittgenstein, Hocquard has fused his interest in the philosophy of language with his dedication to the most elemental forms of experience. Calm and alarming at the same time, they reveal the present moment in its eternal act of passage.

The author of over twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, and inter-genre work, EMMANUEL HOCQUARD has been key in the development of "modernite negative," the literary concept and direction that has done more than any other to shape French poetry since 1968. Hocquard has also been instrumental in the influential small press Orange Export, the reading series at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the American wing of the Royaumont group translation project, and "Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique," an organization that fosters Franco-American poetic exchange.

JEAN-JACQUES POUCEL is a critic, poet, and translator. An associate professor of French at Yale, he is the author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory, co-editor of Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec, and editor-at-large of the on-line journal, Drunken Boat.