Face Before Against Book

Poetry. Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs. "Isabelle Garron's FACE BEFORE AGAINST is characterized by a paradoxical duality, being a collection of long, fluid poems made up of compact, minimal texts. This juxtaposition creates a compositional tension that is sustained throughout the work, which oscillates in its method between intellectual rigor on the one hand, and intimate, almost sensuous perception on the other. Also characteristic of Garron's poetry is the understated presence of the visual arts, which inform her writing in both its subject matter and in its thoughtful approach to formal structure and typographic detail. In my opinion, FACE BEFORE AGAINST is one of the most compelling works of French poetry to have been published in recent years. We have Sarah Riggs to thank for making it available to Anglophone readers"--Guy Bennett. "With FACE BEFORE AGAINST Sarah Riggs offers us a somber, faithfully measured, precisionist rendition which at the same time adds light, insight, levity, and American vocal tonality to Isabelle Garron's important work in its first full-length English appearance. Face devant contre, Garron's book of poems in five acts, confronts weighty questions of alterity and self, representation and abstraction, speech and punctuation, action and absence with the delicate consideration that finely faceted objects merit. These poems serve the reader as instruments for in-depth inquiry and exploration of movements as current as they are timeless"--Stacy Doris.