PRAISE

  • “Bergvall’s work is about the inscription of language on the body and in that sense touches the pulse of ecriture feminine. It blurs the boundaries of physical, sexual, and translative work, deriving as so much of this work does, from a bilingual French/English aesthetic. But what I admire about Bergvall’s work is its absolute originality, its structural articulations.”

    —Sina Queyras

  • "Caroline Bergvall has emerged over the past decade as one of the most brilliantly inventive poets of our time."

    —Charles Bernstein

First publication (US) of texts and works influenced by research into medieval English alongside essays, drawings, pattern-based pieces and a couple of shorter prose texts.

DETAILS

Full reprint of Goan Atom
Reprint of Cropper chapbook

ISBN: 9780982264584
Nightboat Books, 2011
Designed by Pablo Lavalley

This book gathers a decade of Caroline Bergvall’s innovative pieces, from her long out-of-print performance text Goan Atom, inspired by the graphic contortions of Hans Bellmer’s Doll and violent love fantasies of other radical body-inspired artists, The Shorter Chaucer, a series of contemporary tales exploring social mores in a feisty mix of languages, and the hybrid and visual prose pieces Cropper, Cat in the Throat, and Middling English. This volume—rich, multi-layered, acerbic, humorous—creates a strong case for how new literature can provide speculative and performative excursions into post-urban lives and idioms and explore renewed visions for languages.

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IN FRENCH TRANSLATION: L'Anglais mêlé

REVIEWS

  • For a person relatively unversed in the particularities of her idiolectic, mixed languages, her poetic texts might read like computer code; but since the effort is meaningful, what of it? It points toward the last paradox, that despite her texts’ sophistication — which might seem to inaugurate strictly intellectual pleasures — when the texts enter into the reader’s ear and/or metaphorical bloodstream, the first clear pleasures are intuitive, those of sound, rhythm and cadence and the forever-alive performative dimension of speech. The delights are as alive (and personal) as language exists in the morning before you have re-coded it all into the Queen’s English, or the rational language of book-reviews, or even syntax itself.

    —Matt Reeck, Jacket 2

  • She approaches language as a pliable medium, one whose rules, behaviors, and properties are constantly rediscovered in the process of her work. Meddle English reveals these discoveries and shows us a writer who understands fully the risks, pleasures, and possibilities of her art.

    —Mary Wilson, Make

  • Bergvall turns ‘illegibility’ on its head: she insists on a poetics that is neither merely read nor impossible to read. Instead, Bergvall attempts to offer another way of being, necessarily multiple. This affords space for unknowing, for the unrecognizable, where political vision and perhaps even political intimacy and solidarity does not require immediate recognition within our normative configurations of the sensible and knowable.

    —Rebecca Teich, The Poetry Project Newsletter

  • Love binds, love connects. And through Bergvall’s ongoing commitments, those bindings and connections are explored thoroughly and beautifully. Closing the trilogy, finding the last poem, contains a bit of heartache, a sighing wish for Bergvall to continue. But, in fact, I won’t be surprised if that’s indeed what happens, if Bergvall finds yet another extension to this ongoing work. As Alisoun says in the book’s final poem, “The era of ma tellings nat bygone, just bigonne.” As symbol, as voice, as voices, there is much yet to read, many more moments to listen.

    —Greg Bem, Rain Taxi

PRAISE

  • « Le travail hybride de Bergvall, qui peut prend la forme d'un livre ou d'une installation, d'une vidéo ou d'une performance live ou numérique, se nourrit de sources aussi variées que la musique post-punk, la poésie sonore ou l'Oulipo. Ses dispositifs rhétoriques, sonores et verbaux sont toujours extrêmement sophistiqués et font intervenir calembours duchampiens, jeu de mots bilingues, transferts, paragrammes, idéogrammes, allusions et texte trouvés. »

    —Marjorie Perloff

Eight years in the making this translation by the reputed poets and translators is a fantastic cross-linguistic tour de force.

DETAILS

Les Presses du Réel, 2018
Collection: Motion Method Memory
Adjusted design by Dominique Pasqualini

Première traduction en français du recueil de textes de la poète et performeuse londonienne.

Polymorphe et polyglotte, foisonnant et satirique, L'Anglais mêlé combine savamment un entrelacs de textes dans lesquels Bergvall dialogue avec Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Roberta Flack, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gordon Matta-Clark, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Smithson, et où elle réinvente la langue de Chaucer avec celle de Riddley Walker.

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Middling English