Touché by Pascalle Monnier (translated by Cole Swensen)
Touché by Pascalle Monnier (translated by Cole Swensen)
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
60 pages
© 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961834-10-1
Book and Cover Design: Christopher Nelson
Perfect-bound
6” x 7.5”
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.
Born and raised in Bordeaux, Pascalle Monnier has lived in Paris for most of her adult life. She has been awarded residencies at the Villa Médicis in Rome and from the Mission Stendhal, which allowed her to live for a year in New York. She’s the author of six books, many of which, including Touché, were published by France’s foremost publisher of experimental literature, P.O.L. Other translations of her work into English include Bayart (translated by Cole Swensen, Black Square Editions, 2002) and selections translated by John Ashberry and included in Collected French Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
Cole Swensen has translated more than 25 books of poetry and literary prose from French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation and, in 2024, the ALTA National Translation Award. Also a poet, her books have won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the S.F. State Poetry Center Book Award and have been finalists for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, and the Griffin Prize.
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.