The Next Loves

by Stéphane Bouquet, Lindsay Turner (Translator)

In Stéphane Bouquet’s The Next Loves, French poetic tradition meets the New York School poets in a unique take on homosexuality, desire, loneliness, and love in an era of global inequality and fundamental precarity. Bouquet’s work delicately carves out space for passages from I to you to the collective we.

Genres: Poetry

114 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2013

About the author

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of several collections of poems and—most recently—a book of essays on poems, La Cité de paroles (2018). He has published books on filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Gus Van Sant, as well as screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films, and short films, and has translated poets including Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler, and Peter Gizzi into French. He’s also interested in performance arts and has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre national de la danse in Paris and for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bouquet is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, and has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors. He holds an M.A. in economics from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Next Loves is a sublime, bittersweet book of poems exploring the aches of contemporary gay desire: Grindr meets Pindar; one-night stands meets Gertrude Stein; cruising meets the sonnet. With echoes of the New York School, there is an effervescent attraction in Stéphane Bouquet's collision of sex, lust, urbanity and heartbreak: "my god it’s probably stupid but it happens / so rarely / that our lives are on the right sides of our skins," he writes. For Bouquet, language has to fill in the spaces where the act of love ends; the conversational immediacy of his poems contain an electric and stuttering rhythm. 'Light of the Fig' becomes a eulogy for young victims of homophobic violence, asking us how we can carry on living when a "certain number of our species surely won't." In the lyric-essay 'The Covers', the speaker muses on a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses owned by the man he has just slept with: "The stories all go one way, the same way … What would happen if the metamorphosis, for once, went the other way? If lilacs themselves changed, say (due to their scandalous behaviour), into soldiers?" In chronicling different stories, Bouquet's poems inventively explore the fleeting circulation of gay bodies - whether on the Métro, on an app or map - through both pleasurable and painful encounters. Just as the speaker in 'East Side Story', when asked why he writes poetry, answers "it's very simple: it's because we must steal constantly from absence" so does The Next Loves reclaim a rueful and fragile queerness from that very same space.

[Garry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could say that I enjoyed this slender volume of recent poetry more than I did. The author is gay, I'm gay, but I typically read history and nonfiction and need poems to have some structure and focus to appreciate. I enjoyed a few of the poems but found most to be unfocused, random and more like passing thoughts than polished, completed poems. East Side Story, one of the longer poems was, for me, the best effort.

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Conclusion: it sometimes happens that sentences turn out to be the same thing as the hands you would have found by accident, or maybe because you drew out a map of the neighborhood and traced, in a corner, the big red circle of YOU ARE HERE, then you understand that's exactly the future you had hoped for: over there on the horizon, because of a something rising (let's call it a star), the hope that we could (again) (again? for the first time?) live communally in the sentences."

—The Covers

[Sean Dunnsue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unquestionably good writing that I was more easily able to admire than enjoy. You know? But some poems I did quite enjoy, namely East Side Story and The Covers, and all of them were stately at the very least.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some beautiful moments and I liked the way the collection was organized, but on the whole his poetry didn't quite connect with me.

[grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

definitely an interesting writing style - similar to ocean voung, in my opinion. i liked it though, had some very beautiful lines!