NOUVEAUX EXERCICES

by Franck André Jamme

70 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 2002

About the author

Franck André Jamme has published fifteen books of poems and fragments since 1981, as well as numerous illustrated books (with Jaume Plensa, James Brown, Zao Wou Ki, Marc Couturier, Suzan Frecon, Yang Jie Chang, Olivier Debre, Acharya Vyakul, Philippe Favier). He has been praised by Edmond Jabes, Henri Michaux and René Char (whose Complete Works he has edited in La Pléiade), and has been translated by John Ashbery. He is also a specialist and curator of contemporary Indian Tantric, Brut and tribal arts (for Magiciens de la terre at Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier and Galerie du Jour/Agnes b., Paris, the CCA and Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, Feature Gallery, The Drawing Center and Lawrence Markey Gallery, NYC). He has published numerous works in the United States, including Moon Wood (Selavy Press, 2000); Extracts from the Life of a Beetle (Black Square, 2000); The Recitation of Forgetting (Black Square, 2003); Another Silent Attack (Black Square/Brooklyn Rail, 2006); New Exercises (Wave Books, 2008). He is one of the authors of The Yale Book of French Poetry, 2004. For his life work, he received in 2005 the Grand Prix de Poesie de la Societe des Gens de Lettres. He lives in Paris and Burgundy.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one has been translated into English by Charles Borkhuis and is out via Wave Books. I had no clue what this was and still know next to nothing about the author, but the cover grabbed my attention while I was book shopping with friends. It turns out that this is the exact sort of book that I love. It's poetic, poignant, based in a sort of conceptual exercise. A fast read the first time around, but I nevertheless keep picking it up.