Installations

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

First published in French in 1984, Installations comes to us in a
beautiful translation by award-winning poet Erin Mouré and writer,
translator, and teacher Roberts Majzels.

The book presents a collection of short poems (with such titles as
“Excess,” “Contradiction,” and “Redundancy”) and five to
fifteen lines of text that provide much food for thought. The poems
interrogate the sense of life, its space and time haunted by the
“noisy backlash of centuries.” They speak to all of those who try to
understand the world’s “uncontrollable beauty,” along with its
ambiguities.

The work of an intellectual and poet-philosopher, Installations is
sound, sights, touch, body, lesbian love, writing, and many other
things. It is cerebral, yet physical, and demands to be read slowly and
with discernment. Brossard, a two-time winner of the Governor
General’s Award for poetry, is one of the most important figures in
Quebec literature.