La Presse

The poems in Flirt Formula go two by two, face-to-face across facing pages, where they press up against each other, ricochet off of each other, and generally go forth in tremulous manifesto. The result is a syntactical vertigo poised, like Tarzan and Jane, above utter nothingness. The two halves, each swinging on its own vine, meet only in an instant of glancing intimacy, suggesting that the crux of poetry is the art of not quite touching. This is a book in which the incomplete is not a failure, a book that unfolds like an opera, displaying the endlessly various ways that we fall (but never quite arrive at being) in love.  

Anne Portugalhas published five volumes with the well-known French experimental press P.O.L and a collaboration with the writer-photographer Suzanne Doppelt. She has also collaborated with various other artists, art museums, and the radio program France-Culture. Also a translator, she has contributed extensively to translations of works by Stacy Doris and Caroline Bergvall. Other books of hers available in English include Nude, translated by Norma Cole (Kelsey Street Press, 2001) and absolute bob, translated by Jennifer Moxley (Burning Deck, 2002). Burning Deck has also published a chapbook, Quisit Moment (2008), translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. Portugal is a prodigious traveler has represented France in numerous international conferences and festivals, such as those in China, Norway, Poland, the United States, and Korea. She lives in Paris, where she teaches French and contemporary literature.

TranslatorJean-Jacques Poucelis a critic, poet, and translator. He has taught in the French departments at Yale and Southern Connecticut State University and currently teaches at the University of Calgary. From 2011 to 2012, he was a fellow at Morphomata Internationales in Cologne, Germany, and in 2013 he was a visiting professor at Paris VII-Denis Diderot. The author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory, co-editor of Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec (Yale French Studies 105), and editor-at-large of the on-line journal Drunken Boat, he is a frequent resident in France, where he works with the French-American poetic collective Double Change.