Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.

"[L]yrical descriptions of lesbian desire coupled with a continued meditation on language. Brossard conflates writing with lovemaking […] the poems forming a grammar of desire, like a diagrammed body."— Kate Zambreno, The Believer

"[T]he nearly hundred poems in Ardour appear as fragments, but their brevity belies their breadth. [...] I feel saved by their intimacy, partly owing to their diminutive size: they feel like whispered truths, or at least consolations." — Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

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.