beverley bie brahic's Books
Dec.13.2012
"Isn't it … particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frédéric-Yves Jeannet asks Hélène Cixous in this fascinating book of interviews. "[I]t's only in writing, on paper, … that I reach the most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of me for me. I feel closer to my own mystery in the aura of writing it," Cixous responds.
These conversations, which took place over...
May.01.2012
Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet with her eye on what is happening between us, between continents on which she lives, between familial relationships, between languages in which she works. In this, her second collection—the first to be published in Canada—her assured and dignified voice speaks of the world around her, creating original and fascinating poems.
"These poems live and...
May.01.2012
Forward Prize shortlist for Best Collection 2012. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
In Paris, night falls without haste; starlings. flock to the oak. A neighbour appears on her porch, gives her white cloth a conjuror's shake . . .
Brimming with light and wit and appetite, White...
Jan.13.2012
Apollinaire – whose writings ranged from plays to experimental poetry, from art criticism to erotica – was at the heart of literary and artistic life in early 20th-century Paris. Both his work and his flamboyant personality had a defining influence on the development of Surrealism, Dadaism and other artistic movements.
In late 1914 Apollinaire swapped the high life of avant-garde...
Feb.07.2011
"A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Hélène Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly but still truculent mother and her writer-daughter, between the mother and her sister, and between the writer and her vanished but nonetheless intensely present friend, Jacques...
Oct.19.2008
‘So here I am with my pebble, which intrigues me, touches unknown springs in me. With my pebble that I respect. With my pebble for which I want to substitute an adequate logical (verbal) formula . . .’ (‘My Creative Method’)
Still radical, the poems of Francis Ponge (1899–1988) seek to give the...
Oct.17.2008
Tragedy and comedy intimately and movingly mingle in Hélène Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. Its narrator, who resembles Cixous, recounts the birth and death of her first child, a Dawn's syndrome baby she abandons to the care of her midwife mother in an Algerian maternity hospital. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from...
Oct.17.2008
Born to an Algerian-French father and a German mother, both Jews, Hélène Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crises. In this moving story she recounts how small domestic events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later with social and psychological meaning. The story's protagonist, whose life resembles that of the author, endures a...
Oct.17.2008
Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and...
Oct.17.2008
Jacques Derrida argues that the feminist and intellectual Hélène Cixous is the most important writer working within the French idiom today. To prove this, he elucidates the epistemological and historical interconnectedness of four terms: genesis, genealogy, genre, and genius, and how they pertain to or are implicated in Cixous's work.
Derrida explores Cixous's genius (a masculine...
Oct.17.2008
Roni Horn's work ranges from unapologetically pretty color close-ups of striking young faces (This is Me, This is You) and darkly patterned studies of the surface of the River Thames (Dictionary of Water) to her playful abstractions and wordplay-filled installations inspired by the French feminist theorist and writer, Hal ne Cixous. Rings of Lispector draws in turn from the work of...
Oct.17.2008
"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one. . . . What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?"—Hélène Cixous, from Dream I...
Oct.17.2008
Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-...
Oct.17.2008
Hyperdream is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end - and that's the end. For you, for me.
But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life?
Hyperdream invests this fragile, tentative suspension of...
About beverley
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC was born in Canada, and lives in Paris and Stanford, California. A translator and poet, her work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, and...