Common Life

"Common Life, Lindsay Turner’s English rendition of Stéphane Bouquet’s La Vie commune (published in France in 2016), achieves something rare: an alignment between text and translation so seamless it seems to create a whole new object, neither original nor variant but a lustrous synthesis of sensibilities.”—Anahid Nersessian, NYRB

"Turner’s excellent translation allows these unfailingly imaginative, intriguing, and various pages to scintillate. Readers willing for frequently dramatic shifts in form will enjoy the ride."—Publishers Weekly

"Stéphane Bouquet is an astonishingly bold poet—at once cosmic and intimate, harsh and hilarious—and he can do it all. With elegies, dramatic dialogues, and narratives, he weaves an ever expanding schema of every day queer life. A life filled with eros and wonder and political awareness. Common Life is multivalent tour de force."—Peter Gizzi

"Down-to-earth but with an eye on eternity, Common Life is full of delights—philosophical, sensual, and above all, convivial. Lindsay Turner’s English lights up Bouquet’s style with the suppleness of sunlight in Poussin—present, alert, yet poised to evanesce. This book asks what it means to live together, even in Arcadia, but its cache of lyric forms serves to test what might be perishable—art, the tongue that speaks, but never, it seems, love itself."—Joyelle McSweeney