My planet of kites by Marie-Ève Comtois and translated by Michele Winters, Stuart Ross

This is poetry from Canada.

My planet of kites by Marie-Ève Comtois translated by Michele Winters, Stuart Ross is published by Mansfield Press. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781771260619E12.

My Planet of Kites, by Marie-Ève Comtois and translated by Michele Winters and Stuart Ross, has a title that feels airy, childlike, and cosmically odd. A planet of kites suggests play scaled up into a whole world, strings tying the hand to the sky, fragile structures held aloft by weather. As a French-Canadian collection, the book likely brings together whimsy and seriousness in a way that resists the false split between imagination and adult feeling. I would read it for its vertical motion: the poem as lift, tether, drift, and bright paper against the air. The co-translation gives the book another kind of stringwork, a collaborative effort to carry Comtois’s lyric play into English.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.