The Next Loves
LONGLISTED for the 2020 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN POETRY
FINALIST for the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD
In Stéphane Bouquet's The Next Loves, French poetic tradition meets the New York School poets in a unique take on homosexuality, desire, loneliness, and love in an era of global inequality and fundamental precarity. Bouquet's work delicately carves out space for passages from I to you to the collective we.
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Stéphane Bouquet is the author of several collections of poems and--most recently--a book of essays on poems, La Cité de paroles (2018). He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, as well as screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films, and short films, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French. He's also interested in performance arts and has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la danse in Paris and for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bouquet is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, and has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors. He holds an M.A. in economics from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018) and The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet (forthcoming, Nightboat Books), as well as a book of philosophy by Frederic Neyrat, Atopias (co-translated with Walt Hunter, Fordham University Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2017 French Voices Grant for her translation of Stéphane Bouquet's Vie Commune (currently seeking an American publisher). Originally from northeast Tennessee, she holds an A.B. from Harvard College, a Masters in cinema from the Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. In 2018-19, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.
"This collection of rueful, frank, breezily wanton love poems by a notable contemporary French poet has almost none of the hiccups and irregularities one expects from a translated work. (The original French isn't provided, so it's unclear what liberties Turner is taking, but whatever they are, she should keep taking them.)"--David Orr, The New York Times
"In a flâneur-esque mode reminiscent of Jacques Prévert and Frank O'Hara, this poetry collection traces the ebb and flow of intimacy in contemporary gay life. Bouquet's effervescent intellect lends a philosophical air to urban strolling and digital scrolling; hookup apps and YouTube catalyze meditations on time's indifference to human affairs, and even solitude is erotically charged. But the book's vitality is underpinned with grief: for Bouquet, the freedom and possibility of queer desire are tinged with isolation and with vulnerability to intolerance."--The New Yorker
"It's been a while since I read poetry that moved me as much as did The Next Loves by Stéphane Bouquet (translated by Lindsay Turner)... I found my eyes scanning and rescanning the page, reading the words aloud to myself and tasting the way they sounded in my mouth, almost as if they were hungry."--Talia Franks, Word-for-Sense
"Like some of the most memorable poets of the last half-century, Bouquet is devoted to a poetry that earns, by its attention to the everyday, each flight into rhetorical excess."--John Steen, Full Stop
"Sweetbitter are the comings and goings of eros--'There's always someone coming slowly towards him and leaving him slowly and leaving him ecstatic'--and of light, say, filling a room and then emptying it, and of lovers, emptying and filling each other, in one city, in many cities, around the world, visited in the prolific travels of a global itinerant. The Next Loves works out desire with a 'superior tenderness.' These are today's poems of love."--ADITI MACHADO
"'Holy fuck! this is amazing.' So I wrote translator Lindsay Turner when I read Stéphane Bouquet's poems in proof, and so it is. Sexy, tender, deceptively casual, lightly learned, these are urbane, sensuous, romantic poems of the city--Paris, New York, the remembered city of Rimbaud, of James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara, the 21st-century city of metro stops, ads, chance encounters, smartphones, blowjobs. Turner has brought over into a fleet and richly textured American English a new, queerly resonant, utterly contemporary note--a Parisian-cum-Mediterranean sensibility inflected by American grit and open swing. The glance, the app, the hookup, the bed sheets, the haze, a long swim, a shared meal, the shape of a day, a week, a month, a sustained and pivoting thought 'carving some space in the moment': these poems keep the heart's calendar and loneliness's address. Ranging from short heart-stopping lyrics to longer unspooling sequences, Bouquet manifests a flair and profundity I didn't know how much I missed in poetry until I read this book. Pindar praised victorious athletes and their sponsors; Bouquet sings the song of love's votaries and losers, of the wounded and dead, of the dirty and luminous real. Such poets remind us, gloriously and painfully, that we are but creatures of a day: 'who knows/if we'll be held close in the occasional posthumous rush of things.'"--MAUREEN N. MCLANE
"This brilliant collection unites technologies ancient and new--cruising, Facebook, Grindr, the sonnet--to make poems of indefatigable sweetness, freshness, and insight. Stéphane Bouquet writes like the angelic offspring of Frank O'Hara and Sandro Penna, and some of his poems, like the breathtaking 'Light of the Fig, ' have already installed themselves among my canon of astonishments."--GARTH GREENWELL
