Notebook of Roses and Civilization

Brossard conflates writing with lovemaking—“at the hour of bedsheets or ink”—the poems forming a grammar of desire, like a diagrammed body. She moves from “the thousand and one possibilities of the toe, the foot / the ankle / images in the subway glued to each other / faces pressed against the whys” to an underworld of the nocturnal populated by heroines with screaming bodies show more suffering from desire and nostalgia, suffused with loss. show less