Phototaxis
ByPublisher Description
"How might we live in a world so full of contempt for us? How might we love each other in a smouldering cityscape where we are nothing but flickering lights over black waters, parasites, hosts, forgetful martyrs, prisoners staving off state-sanctioned cannibalism? War is never declared, yet its victims are innumerable. Bodies fall, pianos gather dust, governments collect data and impose curfews. Meat rots in the street, innocence is always a lie. We flagellate ourselves by the side of the highway in hopes of forgetting forgetting itself. Every cause is already lost, and every disappearance is wholly devoid of poetry. Nevertheless, despite everything, in the darkness, Narr still sings her song of light. Tapiero’s dizzying chronicle of beauty and horror is exquisitely rendered here in Schluter’s ethereal yet precise translation."—Simon Brown
"Olivia Tapiero’s virtuosic Phototaxis reverses the purgative gesture of necrophoresis: every sentence is shot through with the stench of carrion and the death rattle of capital’s circulation. Reading the text, one feels the vertigo of an interminable fall refracted in an infinity mirror of the commodified image. Tapiero’s haunting lyricism, atmospherically rendered in Kit Schluter’s translation, will ring out in your skull long after reading the book’s final word: music."—Jackie Wang
“Olivia Tapiero’s Phototaxis propels us through exploding whales, ‘silky little bodies,’ oceans ‘gorged with toxic oysters,’ dazzling despair and seeping song. In Kit Schluter’s lush yet exacting translation, three figures navigate life in a collapsing world of crumbling language and intact borders. As this symphony of ruin reaches its crescendo, we realize this world might just be our own.”—Emma Ramadan
“Canadian writer Tapiero’s narratively opaque but politically acute English-language debut… is a confrontational but eminently quotable text. This cyclone of art, destruction, and nonconformity impresses.” —Publishers Weekly
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About Olivia Tapiero
Olivia Tapiero is a writer and translator. She has published Les murs (2009), Espaces (2012), Phototaxie (2017) and Rien du tout (2021), and has co-edited Chairs (2019). She is a literary director at Moebius, and has contributed to magazines such as Tristesse, Estuaire, Relations and Liberté. She lives in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal).
Kit Schluter is a poet-translator & bookmaker living in Mexico City. His poetry & stories have appeared in Boston Review, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail,Folder, Hyperallergic, and in the chapbooks Inclusivity Blueprint, Journals, Translations of Forgetting, Without is a Part of Origin, and the newly released collections of stories and drawings, 5 Cartoons/5 caricaturas (tr. Mariana Rodríguez, Juan Malasuerte Editores) and The Good in Having a Nuclear Family (Despite Editions). Soon to be published is a bilingual edition of the story An Umbrella (translated as Un paraguas by Daniel Saldaña París for Joven Club Werther in Mexico City). Among his published and forthcoming translations from the French, Occitan, and Spanish are books by Olivia Tapiero (Phototaxis, Nightboat) Anne Kawala (Screwball, Canarium), Jaime Saenz (The Cold, Poor Claudia), Michel Surya (Dead End, Black Sun Lit), Julio Torri (Essays & Poems, Archivo48), Marcel Schwob (The Book of Monelle; The Children's Crusade, foreword by J.L. Borges, & The King in the Golden Mask, Wakefield Press), Amandine André (Circle of Dogs with Jocelyn Spaar; Some Thing, with Lindsay Turner, Aphonic Space), and Clamenç Llansana (Goliard Songs, Anomalous), with others on the way. Completed translations of Pierre Alferi's Chercher une phrase, in collaboration with Anna Moschovakis. He is recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in translation, a Glascock Prize, and a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize, and holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University. Kit co-edits O'clock Press, designs for Nightboat Books and Juan Malasuerte Editories, and with Tatiana Lipkes organizes the monthly reading series at Aeromoto, a public arts library in Mexico City. The series will soon be anthologized bilingually by Ediciones Gato Negro and UNAM/the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and E.M. Wolfman in Oakland, CA.
Other books by Olivia Tapiero
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