In Reverse
Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from the French by Claire Eder & Marie Moulin-Salles
Abandoning the computer
dispensing with the airplane the train the rotary press
gunpowder compass the printing press
you have them scrapped
the very subtle flower of your centuries of intelligence:
the bloody man and his screams under concrete
which the television placed ungarnished
between the celery and the coq au vin
on the evening's tablecloth.

Hello Lebanons hello Americas
hi there
and the East wasteland of atomic Russian philosophies
is a prophecy
is a future that is mostly here.

I extract you all
counting on you to extract me as well.

I am still the master
of my anamorphoses.

To any taker I bequeath the benefit
of real time as they say
unacceptable to the slow identity of my flesh.

With arms spread wide I make a hard turn back
toward my bird
which eats the worm of my esophagus
which sustains itself on the grassy villi of my guts.

I unpack all the species of myself.

My horse body sleeps on my cliff body
which reaches out to my ocean body.



À rebours

Abandonnant l'ordinateur
quittant l'avion le train les rotatives
poudre boussole presse à bras
tu mets à la casse
la très subtile fleur de tes siècles d'intelligence:
l'homme en sang et ses hurlements sous béton
que la télévision disposa tels quels
entre le céleri et le coq au vin
sur la nappe du soir.

Bonjour Libans bonjour Amériques
bien le bonjour
et l'Orient désert des perspectives atomiques russes
en prophétie
en avenir qui est un peu là.

Je vous sors
attendant que vous me sortiez.

Je suis encore maîtresse
de mes anamorphoses.

Je laisse à qui voudra le bénéfice
du temps réel comme vous dites
non acceptable à l'identité lente de ma chair.

Je rebrousse très fortement
vers mon oiseau bras déployés
qui mangeait mon ver d'œsophage
lequel se sustentait aux villosités herbues de mes tripes.

Je détasse en moi toutes les espèces.

Mon corps cheval se couche sur mon corps falaise
en vue de mon corps océan.
from the book THE HOPKINS REVIEW
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This poem comes from Bancquart’s 1988 collection Opéra des limites (Opera of Limits). It’s the final poem in the section entitled “Leçon des choses” or “Object Lessons,” and the poems in this section frequently enact a transformation from the human to the nonhuman—or in this case, to the more-than-human. In a brilliant anamorphosis (“I am still the master / of my anamorphoses”), Bancquart positions us so that we can see the entirety of deep time extending out from our human bodies.

Claire Eder on "In Reverse"
Color headshot of a smiling Remica Bingham-Risher
"Remica Bingham-Risher Wins Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Prize"

"Room Swept Home tells the stories of two women, her paternal great-great-great grandmother Minnie Lee Fowlkes who was enslaved, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight whose post-partum depression led to hospitalization at the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Negro Insane in Petersburg. That’s where the paths of the two women crossed in 1941. Neither knew that four decades in the future, their shared progeny would link them in a work of art that’s like a family heirloom."

via OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY
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cover of Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology by Chloe Garcia Roberts
What Sparks Poetry:
Chloe Garcia Roberts on Language as Form


"I’ve always enjoyed the thought of writing as a force that could effect the inversion of that arrow, the timeline, with its incessant forward hurl. For this piece though, I wanted to attempt to use my subjective experience as a basis for objective conclusions. I dreamt about writing poems that were lightly disguised as a proofs. 'Temporal Saturation' is the first poem in Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, and it is the template that I used for writing the rest of the book. The first part of the poem is analytic and the second lyric but neither section can exist without each other, they are one."
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