It Then

Poetry. Translated from the French by Norma Cole. The first English translation of this French poet, now an influence on many young American poets, who died at the age of 37 in 1978. Beverly Dahlen comments: “Collobert’s dash is a materialization of the gap within speech and the rush to close even as one discloses it… the page bears the record of these bursts of language …Collobert insists on being without a subject, ‘ as if being were radically different from, absolutely divided from its subject. And like an archeologist she preserves the fragments of this ruined subject against time, to reproduce the duration’ …appalling in the intensity of their imagination of the literal body transmuted into writing.” Michael Palmer comments: “She enunciates the words for desire and for loss the other words with harrowing intensity. IT THEN explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category.”