Sébastien Smirou is the author of three books of poetry, Un temps pour s’étreindre, Beau voir, and Mon Laurent, and a prose meditation, Un temps pour se séparer: notes sur Robert Capa. A psychoanalyst, Smirou has translated Antonino Ferro’s Rêveries and Domenico Chianese and Andreina Fontana’s Immaginando from the Italian, and has been a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome.
In eight sections of eight poems each, Sébastien Smirou’s See About constructs an eccentric menagerie—from grand lion to tiny worm—that intertwines animal and human subjectivity. Poised between exploration and exhibitionism, inventory and invention, See About is a book for featherless bipeds enthralled by rhyme, nonsense, the run-on sentence, and the sing-along.
Andrew Zawacki has published four poetry books, most recently Videotape. His translation of Smirou's My Lorenzo received a French Voices Grant; he has also had grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Centre National du Livre as well as a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Zawacki edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems.
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