Poetics of Work
Poetics of Work
Noémi Lefebvre
Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis
A state of emergency has been declared in France. In Lyon, protesters and police clash in the streets. At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipian experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.
PRAISE FOR POETICS OF WORK
“This experimental novel is partly a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for poets and partly a Socratic dialogue with a superego called Papa, who thinks poetry is pointless. An unnamed, genderless narrator wanders around Lyon, smoking joints and questioning society’s ideas of usefulness… They read obsessively about the Third Reich and see echoes in the xenophobic tenor of contemporary France, hinting that capitalism and fascism share a disregard for anything considered unproductive.”—The New Yorker
“Brilliant, witty, utterly contemporary.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Poetics of Work is a divine, social comedy. Lefebvre finds humor in the essential paradox of the contemporary bourgeoisie, and the laughs come deep bellied and serious.”—Rain Taxi
“A smart, timely, and novel proposal for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy.”—Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up
PRAISE FOR BLUE-SELF PORTRAIT
"Blue Self-Portrait wraps its difficulties in mercurial humor and wordplay, gamely translated from the French by Sophie Lewis. It’s inviting enough to read and re-read, and dense enough to provoke different responses each time."—The Wall Street Journal
"Blue Self-Portrait is inventive and funny—as well as clever—cycling at breakneck speed through the atrocities of the 20th century."—The Millions
"Blue Self-Portrait may be the antidote to our condition of having too many things on the mind."—KQED
"Blue Self-Portrait glances askance at the mythos of male genius and the mute, compliant notion of womanhood on which it relies."—Public Books
"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."—Publishers Weekly
“These subjects, ranging from anxiety that his sexual desirability is dependent on his girlfriend imagining she’s sleeping with the next Schoenberg, to the paralysing effect of nazism on art, to beautiful insights into the compositional process, ensure that the book is no melancholic meditation on lost loves. For a comparatively short novel, Blue Self-Portrait yokes together an extraordinary profusion of ideas."—Eimear McBride, The Guardian
“Were we to note the musical expression with which Blue Self-Portrait is performed, it would be con bravura, or even scatenato: unchained, wildly.”—BOMB Magazine
PRODUCT INFO
First Published: March 2, 2021
Fiction/Literary
5.25 x 8 | 112 pages
Rights: NA
978-1-945492-44-0 (paperback)
978-1-945492-48-8 (ebook)
OTHER TITLES
