“Between these covers unfolds a bit of a detective story: what can words see on the other side of themselves, the side hidden from human vision and thought? This delicate, evocative and beautifully translated exploration leads the wanderer through a landscape and its doubles. Memory, representation, language, thought: the mountain, the mind and the word are reciprocally haunted by these ‘problems.’ In the breach (where world, word and individual human divide, and also where they make contact) is something transcendent.” —Eleni Sikelianos

“Rendered in the clean language and clear grammar of Cole Swensen’s translation, Nicolas Pesquès’ Juliology proceeds to dismantle the logic of grammar, making the reader uneasy amid the collision of sensation and reason. Insistent, elegant, Pesquès declares, ‘my only transgression / has been to trample / the rapacious view again and again.’ This claim is too modest. What the poet offers is a ‘hinge’ onto a new language, the escape hatch through which words and grammar have been abducted. Poetry has been expelled from the false Eden of assumptions into new terrain, ‘as if a gorgeous separation / resounded // as if we could shape letters from light.’” —Elizabeth Robinson