‘Avant Desire’ Collects Nicole Brossard's Reflections on Emotional Intimacy and Enduring Lust
Desire is the human craving not just for intimacy, but also for experience and knowledge, of which Nicole Brossard’s Avant Desire—a fervent collection of poetry, fiction, and literary analysis—deliciously captures the core of this spirit. Translated from French by a dedicated editorial team who’ve gathered her best work into one orderly volume, Brossard’s writing transports readers into an inner, reflective world of intense cravings and delights.
Brossard’s poetry derives a certain charm from rebelling against traditional rules of grammar and form, disregarding “proper” punctuation, capitalization, and neat rhyming schemes in favour of luscious language and true, unobstructed thought that flows like a crooked stream—ragged, but smooth.
Verses such as “June Fever” and “The Part of the Whole” tempt the palate with provocative descriptions of what every artistic person seeks daily: stimulation of the mind and body. Just one or the other isn’t enough. Readers will find themselves being taken off-guard by powerfully relatable lines such as this excerpt from “June Fever,” a poem doubling as a tender love letter from one writer to another:
i don’t know why, but rather than reading what you have written, i’d like to imagine it. i picture you obsessively in the midst of writing excessively as if nothing could stop you – so, you never worry about anything. when you quote, however, you must stop, it seems to me.
Hasn’t everyone, at least once in a relationship, admired and felt attraction to a partner’s talent, drive, and ambition, but at the same time resented their dedication to their work? Anything that robs their admirer of their time, their affection? Brossard understands, and rightfully captures, the conflict of loving an ambitious mind. Brossard expresses this in one, breathless sentence without periods or pauses, like a mind working on overdrive. A mind obsessively and frustratingly in love with the idealized object of affection.
Inclusions like “Logical Suite” challenge readers to rethink language entirely. The prose is quick and whip-smart, with some sections presenting familiar words as dictionary definitions recorded by a sensationalist:
“liaison
the more it precedes the ink
pushes precisely (before) outside and inside”
transition
or
droll these signs empty and blue despite
even if (that is to say although)
restriction
nevertheless”
From Brossard’s pen, the meaning of “liaison,” for example, shifts from a merely mechanical, sexual experience to something philosophical and ponderous. “The more it precedes the ink,” is an idea by a writer for a writer; the promise that this love affair will be recorded for future generations to read and analyze. That decision is made before the act of pleasure begins.
In Brossard’s poetry, words are not just words, but the starting point of a thought process. Readers are challenged to question what a word means, and what place it has in an exciting love life, or even just a quiet crush. The true star of Avant Desire is the excerpt “Hotel Rafale,” first published in the full-length novel Baroque at Dawn. Although this piece technically falls under the category of short fiction, it is written in the sensualistic and figurative style of a poem.
It is a story, a poem, an erotic love letter, and a letter of introduction all in one, introducing readers to the perceptive of sexually confidant Cybil Noland, a relatable character in that she is a lover, an intellectual, a dreamer, and a writer all in one. Brossard has a talent for making readers see themselves in the form of one or two characters, usually women, who fully embody the more passionate side of humanity.
One obstacle that readers new to Brossard’s work may face is missing out on rich inclusions of various historical and mythological references, perhaps causing many to pause to Google an unfamiliar name or a word. But if the reader—like this collection’s illustrious author and characters—has a natural curiosity about the world and a strong enough desire to decipher it, this shouldn’t be an issue in the slightest.
Brossard writes specifically for and about people like herself: people who embrace life, grasp for it, rethink it, question it, reorganize it, and, most especially, create great, lasting art out of it.
Thank you to Coach House Books for providing Shrapnel with a media copy of Avant Desire, which is available now for purchase at Coach House Books’ website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $26.95 CAD
ISBN: 9781552454039
Genre: Poetry
Pub date: August, 2020
Book Review
-
February 20,
2022
-
5-minute read
E.R. Zarevich
is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. She has been published previously in Understorey Magazine, Living Education Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Dreamers Creative Writing, Prepare for Canada, and Women in Higher Education.