Common Life
A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play--all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world.
In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.
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Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the poetry chapbook Fortnights (forthcoming, Doublecross Press). Her translations from the French included books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Éric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Frédéric Neyrat, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Richard Rechtman. She has twice received French Voices Grants for her translations. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds an A.B. from Harvard College, a Masters in cinema from the Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. She lives in Denver, where she is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.
"Turner's excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride."--Publishers Weekly
"Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet--at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious--and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and narratives, he weaves an ever expanding schema of every day queer life. A life filled with eros and wonder and political awareness. Common Life is multivalent tour de force."--Peter Gizzi
"Down-to-earth but with an eye on eternity, Common Life is full of delights--philosophical, sensual, and above all, convivial. Lindsay Turner's English lights up Bouquet's style with the suppleness of sunlight in Poussin--present, alert, yet poised to evanesce. This book asks what it means to live together, even in Arcadia, but its cache of lyric forms serves to test what might be perishable--art, the tongue that speaks, but never, it seems, love itself."--Joyelle McSweeney
