A Spectacular Influence

Because I have no voice anymore what I say has no air. Did I strangle you? I killed you to let the wind in.

Chantal Neveu’s A Spectacular Influence inclines bodies and worlds, registering their turn as atomized events. This semantic partition distributed into four parts that decline the body’s perplexity before the real, inscribes an intimate range of material probabilities and improbabilities.

Written in spare lines and minimalist language, A Spectacular Influence attends to the sensation of motional inertia and celebrates the relational in the human collective experience.

In a graceful, rich translation by acclaimed author and translator Nathanaïl, A Spectacular Influence confirms Neveu’s poetic range and extends the elegant musicality of her earlier choreographic poem, Coit.

AUTHOR

Chantal Neveu

CHANTAL NEVEU is the author of several books of poetry, including you; La vie radieuse (This Radiant Life, winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize); coït (Coït); and Une spectaculaire influence (A Spectacular Influence). She has created numerous interdisciplinary literary works, in Canada and abroad. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She has held residencies at Maison de la poésie de Nantes (France), Passa Porta and Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), and Villa Waldberta (Germany). Neveu lives in Montreal.

Reviews

“In this book, magnificent with density, the most external events are retranslated into intimate events. The writing produces effects of counterpoint that seem to layer several melodic lines that are tied one to the other. And it is there, in that musical space, that the body is exposed: something arises that changes it, jars it, modulates it, brings about a state or a motion that is the sign of life beating.”—Spirale

“Chantal Neveu’s A Spectacular Influence, translated by Nathanaël, is a dark, dense exploration of violence and intimacy — of our traumatic connections to the world and one another.”—Winnipeg Free Press

This is poetry, radically.”—Le Devoir

“Une Spectaculaire Influence traverses the question of the representation and the place of the body in the midst of the fluctuating settings that surround us.”—Cahier Critique de Poïsie