With tantalizing titles like “Only a Body to Measure Reality By,” “Process of a Yes that moves its energy,” “On Hell,” “Are my tears universal?” and “Margin for Manoeuverability,” Nicole Brossard's essays pull the reader into writing that is gentle, searching, and unflinching in its examination of ideas, issues, and life. The difficult line between reality and fiction, the question of writing in French or English, women authors, Djuna Barnes, strategies of lesbian writing, the sensuousness of language? these are among the topics approached and opened within Brossard's philosophy in Fluid Arguments.
Containing texts created between 1981 and the present, this book offers the first collection of Nicole's work to include essays she wrote originally in English.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal in 1943. Twice Governor General’s Award winner for her poetry, she has published more than thirty books since 1965. Many have been translated into English: Mauve Desert, The Aerial Letter, Picture Theory, Lovhers, Baroque at Dawn, The Blue Books, Installations, Museum of Bone and Water, Fluid Arguments, Notebook of Roses and Civilization and White Piano. She has co-founded and co-directed the literary magazine La Barre du Jour (1965-1975), co-directed the film Some American Feminists (1976), and co-edited the acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec (1991 and 2003).
She is an officer of the Order of Canada, chevalière of the National Order of Quebec, and a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. She has twice won the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival Grand Prix Québecor (1989 and 1999). In 1991 she was awarded le Prix Athanase-David (the highest literary recognition in Québec). Her work has been widely translated into English and Spanish and is also available in many other languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, Romanian, Norwegian, Catalan, and Portuguese. Two anthologies of her work in English have appeared: Selections: the poetry of Nicole Brossard (2010) and Mobility of Light (2009), with another planned for publication in 2020.
Nicole has been awarded le Prix international de la littérature francophone Benjamin Fondane, le Prix du CIÉF for International Francophone Studies, the W.O. Mitchell Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. In 2015, she was included in the dictionary Le Petit Robert des noms propres. In 2018, she was the recipient of the first Violet Prize awarded by the Blue Metropolis Festival. Mauve Desert has been presented as a multidisciplinary creation in 2018 and is slated for an opera adaptation in 2020-21.
In 2019, an anthology of her poetry in Portuguese and a translation of Mauve Desert in Catalan will be published. Her most recent book in English is an art chapbook titled A Cappella with illustrations by Mauricio Corteletti, translated by Erín Moure and Robert Majzels.

Nicole Brossard's profile page

Susan Rudy is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She has served as Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University, as a Killam Resident Fellow at the University of Calgary, and as President of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures / Association des literatures canadiennes et québécoise (1994-96). She is author of Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference, as well as several nationally distributed articles and reviews.

Susan Rudy's profile page

Ann-Marie Wheeler's profile page