Flirt Formula

Anne Portugal (trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel)

The poems go two by two across facing pages, where they press against each other, connect, and go forth in a tremulous manifesto. The result is a syntactical vertigo poised above nothingness. The halves meet only in an instant, suggesting that the crux of poetry is the art of not quite touching.

We loved to surrender hardly located know
that we were the ruin
just juxtaposed bouquets
that each of us had a social hook
minimum tender

Anne Portugal lives and teaches in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous volumes of experimental poetry.

Translator Jean-Jacques Poucel is a scholar of French poetry and comparative poetics, and lives in Paris, France.