The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems

In this stunning addition to the Pleiades Press Translation Series, rendered in Marilyn Hacker’s innovative translation from the original French, Samira Negrouche confronts a war-torn Algeria, amidst the Arab Spring, cataloguing, in her luminary genre-bending poetry, grief, exile, and revolution. Philip Metres writes, “A poetic descendant of Etel Adnan, Negrouche deftly moves from poems to prose, from coasts to caravans, from surrealist landscapes to erotic interiors. Writing in the empire’s language, Negrouche casts her poems into the “‘complex structure of silences’” that French can’t follow: “‘I would like / in a faraway language / to tell you what I don’t / understand.’” These are imporant poems, and Hacker gives us the gift of reading them in English for the first time in a collected volume.