Olivier Cadiot’s Red, Green and Black

Red, Green & Black is almost (just about, quite like, virtually, similar to) a translation of Cadiot’s French "original," with this difference: its life in "the American" hits the "target" just as often as in the French. Olivier Cadiot–one of Paris’ most provocative, original, and funny new poets–teams up with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s Charles Bernstein to compose a poem noir, where it’s never clear what’s happening or who done it–only that a new kind of poetry from France has just arrived. "The game is grammatical, but the arrow hits: a real corpse decomposes. Between repetition, tautology and quotation, falls dead silence. What seems a sort of ready-made language (in which Charles Bernstein’s playfulness matches Cadiot’s) turns out to be a carnival on top of catastrophe/catastrophic. Need I add: a poem for our time?" – Rosmarie Waldrop