0 Menu

AN AMERICAN SUITE by Pierre Joris

$12.00 USD

"Polyglottish and dense...contemplative and exact with images...drunkenly mimetic...An American Suite is a bold attempt to think of some 'way out / of these calendric / interstices.'" - Full Stop

$12

Sourced from never-before published manuscripts and personal papers, An American Suite traces the many boundaries that Pierre Joris encounters on his circa 1970s journey through Europe, North Africa, and into America—national borders, walls and coastlines, temporary lodgings, language and perception, death itself—are crossed, exorcised, or transgressed through will and imagination. Breath by breath, these poems exude immediacy, fluidity, and resilience.

Poet, translator, essayist, and anthologist Pierre Joris has published some fifty books, most recently, Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012; Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (winner of the ALTA National Translation Award); A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly; and Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature, co-edited with Habib Tengour. Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, essays on Joris’ work edited by Peter Cockelbergh, came out in 2012. With Jerome Rothenberg, he edited volumes one and two of Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. He lives and works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. They are currently at work on Talvera: A Millennium of Occitan Poetry (Poems for the Millennium, Volume Six).