beverley bie brahic | Author

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White Sheets, Toronto Launch

May.09.2012

White Sheets, Toronto Launch

Next Wednesday, May 15, 6:30-8:00 pm, at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street,

Featured Works

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PUBLISHED: May.01.2012

White Sheets

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 Sheets is a book of clear-sighted affection in...

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PUBLISHED: Feb.07.2011

Hemlock, by Hélène Cixous (translation)

"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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.02.2009

This Incredible Need to Believe, by Julia Kristeva (Finalist for the 2010 French-American Foundation Translation Award)

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PUBLISHED: Oct.19.2008

Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud (Finalist for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation 2009)

‘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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Hyperdream, by Helene Cixous (nominated by Polity Press for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2010)

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...

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PUBLISHED:

Against Gravity (poems)

"It never fails to astonish me / how quickly the body knows what it wants," begins "Never," from Beverley Bie Brahic's 2005 poetry collection, "Against Gravity." Ranging widely in space, from France, where Brahic lives, to Italy, Ireland, California and her native British Columbia, these poems evoke worlds of taste and touch, sounds and smells: flesh...

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PUBLISHED: May.01.2012

White Sheets (Canada-US edition)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Jan.13.2012

'The Little Auto,' by Guillaume Apollinaire (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, by Helene Cixous (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

The Day I Wasn't There, by Helene Cixous (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Reveries of the Wild Woman, by Helene Cixous (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, by Jacques Derrida (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva) by Helene Cixous and Roni Horn (translation)

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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Dream I Tell You, by Helene Cixous (translation)

"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...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.17.2008

Manhattan, by Helene Cixous (translation)

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-...

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beverley's Latest Blogs

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May.21.2012 - 11:49 am

Eclipse

6:33 pm. The birds don’t know what’s happening, they trill like bedtime. Confused they stop. Minus 84% of the sun is still a lot of light. I take my pinhole piece of...

May.19.2012 - 1:01 pm

Climate Change

This morning, while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I stretched out on my back in a patch of sun: I put my hands under my head and closed my eyes, I wiggled my toes in the...

May.17.2012 - 6:37 pm

Backspace

I feel like a Woman of Letters, having published three books so far this year, one of them (White Sheets) twins: one pregnancy, two offspring, not quite identical, but more than...

May.09.2012 - 1:09 pm

White Sheets, Toronto Launch

And here's the flyer:

Comments from beverley

Aug.04.2011 - 12:18 pm

In response to: Hardware

Yes! At the 5 & 10s I

Yes! At the 5 & 10s I remember the candy counter, with slices of pretend-oranges. My sweet tooth has never...

Jul.18.2011 - 10:26 am

In response to: Breathing through my toes

Monks et al

Hi, Bonnie, it's good to hear from you, and thanks for your comments, which sent me off to your own blog. Me too, the...

Mar.25.2011 - 4:36 pm

In response to: Adornment

Knitting Needles

Ah--this reminds me of my daughter catching a plane out of SFO and wondering if her knitting needles would make it...

Mar.10.2011 - 11:52 am

In response to: Bookaholics Anonymous

Oh, I did, I have, years

Oh, I did, I have, years ago, read Rand, but I don't think I cared for her politics, the Man and Superman thing, though...

Nov.05.2010 - 4:33 am

In response to: Pensées

Thanks for your comment,

Thanks for your comment, Stephen. I guess I'm too much of an Anglo-Saxon pragmatist at heart. Or too privileged...

Writing

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Poem: A Web

HOPKINS FOREST, by Yves Bonnefoy (translation by Beverley Bie Brahic)

Published Reviews

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Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud (Finalist for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation 2009)

Published by Poetry London

‘The directness and simplicity of Brahic’s translation are refreshing, and to finally see such previously untranslated works as the titular ode is a great thing indeed’ – Luke...

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...

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