BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 31-Jan-03 | ISBN: 1876857595 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 132pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

Bringing together poetry published during the last six years, Strange Attractors is the most recent and extensive collection by the Prague-based award winning writer Louis Armand. Armand’s themes shift between New York cityscapes and the Moroccan desert; from dissections of contemporary aesthetics, philosophy and politics, to reflections on human intimacy, the sympathetic faculty and violence. Among the most prolific and widely received poets of his generation, Armand’s work has been described by Miroslav Holub as luminous with verbal innovation and critical insight. As the editor firstly of the Prague Revue and later of the PLR (Prague Literary Review) – Armand has participated in, and often presided over, many of the literary transformations and reformations of the decade since communism’s collapse in central Europe. At the same time, Armand’s work has remained strongly internationalist, eschewing the facile temptations of literary nationalism This volume confirms Armand’s standing as a major figure of the Prague renaissance and the post-fin-de-siècle of English-language poetry internationally.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

the geometry lesson; some heliotropes; the geometry lesson; incarnedine; dimensions variable; psychology with nude & mondrian; monument to v. tatlin; stemmata: mode d’emploi; oxygen as a socially useful substance; deriving the circumference; tenor & vehicle; alembic; verlaine at mons; school of fontainbleau; exordium; against a field sinister; alembic; personage & emblems; a perfect bride; study for a portrait, june 16; festina lente; base materialism; trailings; dimensions unknown; towards a geometry of pancreatic islets; craft morphology; footnote to the bride; cloud canyons; jeu lugubre; meat sciences (appliqeé); threshole; concetto spaziale; homage to linnaeus: systema naturae; hortus conclusus; anatomy lessons; tendances morbides; hortus conclusus; rigid designators; factotum; rigid designators; for the duration; jacques cousteau est mort; panopticon; denfert rochereau; serial noir; observations towards an epitaph; porte-jaretelles; scopolamine; chambre noire; symptomologies; prelude to an expedition; incessant acts; parthenogenesis; omitting the weather; plat du jour; documentary; an alphabetum for a.z.; october; prière de toucher; avant-propos; personal appliance; une femme de trente ans; lazarus; abject relations; two figures; sleeping positions

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“Louis Armand seeks to create a different kind of poetry. A voice that is both immediate and reflective, vital and residual. His is a poetry of extraction and distillation that merges myth and presence, that is elegiac and celebratory, ironic and sincere.” —John Kinsella

“Armand pursues the complex challenges language poses and his own language is luminous and original, both in structure and in poetic form.” —John Millett

“Armand’s ideal poet controls not primarily with language’s rhythmic music, but with how words collide and warp upon themselves …” —Ethan Paquin

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Louis Armand lives in Prague where he directs the InterCultural Studies programme in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. His collections of poetry include Inexorable Weather (Arc, 2001), Land Partition (Textbase, 2001) and Malice in Underland (Textbase, 2001). He is also the author of several volumes of criticism including Solicitations: Essays on Criticism and Culture (Litteraria, 2005), Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other (Karolinum, 2005) and Techne (Karolinum, 2003). He is the editor of Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern), JoyceMedia (Litteraria) and Mind Factory (Litteraria).