Touché — recipient of the Stephen Mitchell Prize for excellence in translation

Self-sardonic and often tongue-in-cheek, Touché, composed entirely of aspirations, captures something both subtle and insightful about quotidian struggle and the human spirit—to wit: its refusal to give in, even when wracked by regret, grief, and a tendency to brood. This is a portrait of a person saving herself through wry humor and complex literary allusion. In addition to its darkly uplifting attitude, Touché approaches the personal in a refreshingly impersonal way and models the art of not taking oneself too seriously. 

Praise for Touché

Austere, tender, funny, philosophical, ruthless, self-deprecating, real: Touché contains everything you need for your upcoming travels. In aphoristic precision, this book touches right where it hurts, but with that flick of the blade that brings relief. Because to be invited into the capacious rooms of such a sharp observer of self and world (accompanied by poet and expert translator) makes self and world possible again. Read this as a how-to manual on being. —Eleni Sikelianos

Pascalle Monnier’s exacting study of the power of the infinitive is an endless, almost breathless, catalogue of being, as in, “to” be. Within this adventure of the infinitive, enigmatic questions and declarations are proposed and allowed to flourish. Ultimately though, what flourishes here is an impersonal personhood, each entry opens a vista where meaning continues to amplify, travel, and trouble beauty, wonder, and sorrow. As always, Cole Swensen provides us with a clear and stunning translation. —Peter Gizzi

Read a sample from Touché here.

And the Street — Editor’s Selection for the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize

The street is increasingly the stage on which confrontations and confluences among migrants, police, protestors, and neighbors play out in Europe, especially in France. Depicting this life and the absurdities of contemporary consumer society that go along with it, Alferi uses minimalist forms to accentuate a focus on minute detail, on the small fragilities of the urban ecosystem that often go unnoticed, from mold to insects to security cameras. His work focuses on current political realities, not in their headline versions, but in the intimate, lived experience of those at their heart.

Praise for And the Street

When Pierre Alferi looks at the street, it is teeming with people chatting, drinking, with migrants ejected (“the shame will outlive us”), with “nouveau pedestrians,” cops frisking Blacks, “eco bio deco bingo,” and the last crickets of summer. But while engaging with the world around him, he makes us see the “laugh-track of free radicals,” “the silence of dying cells,” and “the rip in thought.” In forms ranging from free verse to the Chinese juxtaposition of characters, language becomes event—and a second time in Cole Swensen’s felicitous translation. —Rosmarie Waldrop

Personification meets enigma in the ellipsis of phantomine. Pierre Alferi’s poems, in Cole Swensen’s translations are rapiers that cut to the quick of political obscenity and ethical necessity, as if the two are locked in a death embrace, until poetry do them part. “It’s here that we meet”—on this street, in these words, at that parting. —Charles Bernstein 

Placements described with words in a world of breathtaking particularities, And the Street is a remarkable set of poetic texts, creating a series of bold gestures, textures around “the unknown center.” With Pierre Alferi’s delicate, skillful logic, affection breaks usual syntax. So concentrated, each of these brief serial poems resolves its own lyric reality. Each sequence has its own intricate resonance, intensity, color and mood. Occasion is where the heart is, keystones locking into place with registers we hardly are aware of or have forgotten or surprisingly know but don’t assume until they startle us with the urgency of “the sharp / memory of a wave on the shore.” Cole Swensen’s stunning translation is pitch perfect. —Norma Cole

Read a sample from And the Street here.