A Geometry

"I live the text as a body," says Albiach. She lives it literally, in the physical context of breath, of voice, of syntax as a physical next-to-each-other of words. But the images have been reined in, the words eaten into by silence, erased. We are left with only part of a sentence here and there, broken off abruptly, the cut edges rough, giving off sparks like live wires.

Anne-Marie Albiach was born in 1937. Among her books are État (1971; in English: Awede Press, 1989), Mezza Voce (1984; in English: Post-Apollo Press, 1988), Figure Vocative (1985; Vocative Figure, Allardyce Books, 1992), & A Discursive, Space: Interviews with Jean Daive (Duration Press, 1999).

With Claude Royet-Journoud and Michel Couturier, she co-edited the magazine Siécle a mains, where she first published her legendary translation of Zukofsky's "A-9."

"We are not accustomed to a poetry as naked as this .... An alliance of honesty and elegance is here to dazzle once again.... A modern Hamlet with the skull of 'Lucy' in her hand. A uses the very literal parameters of writing to enact a ritual encounter of (self-)consciousness with the human archaic.... Poetry is an 'incantation' that at once invokes and extinguishes the ancestral light, singing into the genetic code to undo it, where the poet 'gives birth in the lineage of chance.' ...This is a deceptively 'little' book--its breadth, in space and time, will leave you reeling."

– Jonathan Skinner, Poetry Project Newsletter