ABOUT THIS BOOK

A richly imagined, physically charged poetry collection in which history, myth, and protest are transformed into lyrical gestures.

Sylvie Kandé’s Gestuary offers a collection of gestures—of death and life, of tenderness and brutality—that fractures the flow of time. Senegalese riflemen from World War I are juxtaposed with migrants at borders who sew their lips shut in protest over immigration policies. In dream-like sequences, the dead refuse to stay underground and “push against the fence / that swings between our realm and theirs.” Inspired by unexpected sources, including jazz, sculpture, the legacy of the slave trade, proverbs, and elements of Diola culture, Kandé’s poems are rich in musicality and sophisticated syntax, rendered into a lyrical and luminous English by Nancy Naomi Carlson.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Sylvie Kandé is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections. Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

REVIEWS

Praise for the original French edition:
‘[ . . . ] compact and sharp, this new collection, Gestuary, is a challenge. In six sections, [Kandé] attempts to capture through language that which “cannot be heard or written”, entrusting words with the task of inscribing gestures in the “fragile eternity” of the poem.’—Monique Pétillon, Cahier Critique de Poésie

Praise for the original French edition:
‘Competing with dance, but also photography and painting, Sylvie Kandé thus assigns, in turn, to poetry the task of “redeeming the death of gestures” in an intimate epic of everyday life’— Dominique Combe, Études de lettres

Praise for the original French edition:
‘Kandé’s language is a rare, magnificent, lively, luxuriant . . . ; the receptacle of all the strangeness, sometimes the foreignness, of reality. A tableau of sounds and meanings.’— Roger-Yves Roche, En attendant Nadeau

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Translator’s Foreword
Of Air and Water
1.Call of Air
2.Gull/Mute
3.Deposits & Withdrawals
4.Sugarcane
5.Waltz of Stone
6.September’s Bird
7.Survival According to Alice
8.Genocide
9.Genealogy
10.On the Whole…
11.Visitation
12.Scraps of a Portrait
13.News by Hand
Striking Hard
1.The Hot Iron Strikes
2.The Final Stroke
3.Awe-Struck
4.Striking a Pose
Digging
1.Rite of Passage
2.Vahine
3.Prayer
4.Departed Night Butterfly of Mine
5.[Grave]s[tone] for Noguchi
The Warring Dead
1.Mobilized
2.The Warring Dead I
3.The Warring Dead II
Better Left Unsaid
1.Winnowing
2.The Egg and the Stone
3.On the “Nine Slaves” Altarpiece
4.Better Left Unsaid
5.Pharaoh Queen
6.Roaming Soul
What Speaking Intends to Say
1.Colophon I
2.Colophon II
Coda