The Hero

Poetry. Women's Studies. Translated by Ann Cefola. "Sanguinetti takes on the archetype of the hero from every angle--at times many simultaneously--and in a language itself heroic in its leaps and shifts and its inventive riffs that tap into ambient legend, with its steaming horses, epic journeys, and, of course, battle. Volatile style, startling content, super-charged tone--Cefola captures them all in her splendidly nuanced translation, a rare case in which nothing at all is lost, and the English language gains a powerful and beautiful book."--Cole Swensen

"[Le Héros] is at once a very contemporary epic, a mythology anchored [in] instantaneous, brief and mobile images found in short films, like a camera on the shoulder..."--Pascal Meunier

"[In Le Héros, let] the light of the text play, because there is a light, a kind of vibration; don't try to capture it and break it up in the prism of analysis."--Florence Trocmé

"THE HERO, shimmering polymorphic figurehead--brother, fiancé, lover, friend, traveler, soldier--follows and reads like a whisper, a breath, a long narrative poem unfolding its oceanic wave from one song to another in the collection."--Angèle Paoli

"THE HERO is about a war and an ageless country, sorrow of women, barbarism of men and the fleeting beauty that sometimes illumines or blinds them. With this new book, Sanguinetti confirms the strength and singularity of her art--the revolt and wonder that characterize her writing, that face a world's crushing defeats while resolving to never accept them."--Poetèque