PRADEAU, Léon; NIZARD, Clara J.; RIVIÈRE, Tancrède (eds.)
Transat’ 2

Each Transat’ issue is built organically, with solicitations from all three editors, and with submissions we receive—but without predetermined expectations or themes. It’s a confrontation of subjectivities—what the current team feels like throwing in the correspondence—and surprises—what the community feels like sharing with us. We do however work for each issue to bring out a new understanding of our transatlantic conversations. Preparing this one, we couldn’t help but notice: 1°) a recurring interest in the sequence form; 2°) a tickling relationship with riddles. [...]

In the inaugural issue, we noted the volume’s interest in “possible poetics:” the tension and release of poetic utterances. With the sequence form, the poem is adjusted into constellation-repetition, seeming to glide from a matter of possibility to an ethos of practice. Each poem a contracting unit, each sequence a longer articulated gesture. Relational, durational, and iterable: a poetry that becomes a grammar, perhaps.

Surfacing alongside the sequence-form—and in some of these poems, accomplicing with it—is a curious predilection for riddles. To us, a thrilling counterpoint to the textures of ease and suppleness we discussed in our previous édito. Here, rather than a kind of constitutive decontraction, it is rather through encryption or mystery that several texts proceed. Our contemporary predilections for roteness and repeatability are experimented in a hermetic mode, still capable of producing dizzying linguistic logics.

—from the editorial.

Contributors: Will Mountain Cox, Ken Taylor, Rowan Tate, Sharon Olds, Emma Roustand, Jenkin Benson, Mozziconacci Robert-Teyssier, Tancrède Rivière, Lénaïg Cariou, Christopher Alexander, Judith Goldman, Rita Omaya, Rina Kenović, Antoine Hummel, Owen Brakspear, Stephen Williams.

Published by les murmurations, 2024
Design by Camille Boisaubert
Periodicals / Poetry