I don’t have words
but your gestures
abound
amid the ads
demands
doors
chasms of each sta
tion the voice—
consistent
also in the announcement
made about a delay
for
. train ahead
Described
by
Cole Swensen in her cover blurb as a “massive work of tantalizing minimalism”
is
Parisian poet, critic, editor and associate professor Isabelle Garron’s
latest work in English translation,
BODY WAS: Suites & their variations
(2006-2009), translated by
Eléna Rivera (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021),
following Garron’s collections
Corps fut (Flammarion, 2011),
Qu’il
Faille (Flammarion, 2007) and
Face event contre (2002), translated
by Sarah Riggs as
Face Before Against (Litmus Press, 2008). Produced as
an expansive work, the nearly three hundred pages of
BODY WAS is a book-length
sequence of small moments, gestures and expressions stretched to incredible
lengths; stretched not as a way of thinning, but as a way to articulate and
pause, each moment fragmented into portions, and where lightning strikes in
such slow-motion that every spark appears, if in the briefest sense, self-contained:
brilliant, held and heard. “then a shadow / on bodies,” she writes, early on in
the collection, “bore / ours in count / er // form naked // in the full / moo
// n black [.]” This is an incredible collection of short bursts, a lyric of a
single, extended thread or tether, segmented into line and word breaks,
offering small points of thought, image and sound. The collection begins with
an overheard death, and moves across domestic patter, conversations on the
daily immediate, of arrival and being, and someone waiting to be born. “we
arrive
.it is night
.you will be born this morning [.]” The fragmented
sense of line and lyric, as well as the unexpected placements of punctuation,
force the reading to simultaneously suggest a rush, but also a slowness, to
catch every element as it stands. Segmented into suites and variations,
BODY
WAS exists not as an accumulation, but as a singular whole, writing segments
that articulate the slippery movement of time itself, both immediate and
immediately past-tense. There are elements of this collection that read as a set
of improvisations, comparable to works by
Robert Creeley,
William Carlos Williams or
Fred Wah, yet composed in a loose narrative structure that would
even allow a reader to pick up at any point. As Rivera writes to open her short
afterword, “Points in Time: Where the Body Was”:
It takes a certain amount
of courage in this age of the internet, where a plethora of words abound, to
let the stillness and blank page speak. What I admire in Isabelle Garron’s Body
Was is its combination of lyricism and silence, the rhythm of the language
and the way that she is able to let events, the overheard and experienced, move
in and out of silence, into the body of the page. What remains of experience is
stored in the body and what is written is already what was—the moment is gone. Time
keeps moving. What was experienced is no longer the present. The experience is
carried in the body. The body makes the text.
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