Poetry. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen. C'est toi le business uses an eerie cadence to examine the construction of identity in a media-saturated world. Focusing on icons of cult film from Simone Simon to Blade Runner, she develops a haunting collage of overlay and echo, populated by unsettling twins (a "sister," a clone, a verbal stutter), that evokes the doubles with which a society based on representation invests us.

In "talala" for instance, the terms of identity taken from the film Blade Runner (human being vs. "fake" or "android") are used to raise questions of authorship: do phrases come to us or do we make them, and if they come to us, then from where?

Always conscious of the role that language plays in the mediation between self and media, the book is poetry in its linguistic freedom, film criticism in its thematic aspects, prose in its physical shape. But it always pushes language toward new sensual territory.

Author City: PARIS FRA

Caroline Dubois lives in Paris and teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rueil-Malmaison. She has translated American poets like Norma Cole and Deborah Richards.

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Jason Mashak @ Gently Read Literature