Quisite Moment

Author: Anne Portugal

Translator: Rosmarie Waldrop

Publisher: Burning Deck (2008)

As Anne Portugal has said, her poetry breaks with elevated subjects as well as with the beauty of phrases. “Poetry is is a laboratory of languages. It is first and foremost physical.” Here, she truncates words to give rise to new rhythms, puzzlement, and sheer fun.

"Anne Portugal's exercise in aphaeresis is itself "quisite"! Its inability, or perhaps refusal, at every turn to locate its verbal origin; the constant hollowing out by means of the sidelined asterisks; the sexy aloofness of the object of the speaker's affection; all establish provocative resistances to what otherwise seeks to be sequenced, numerically ordered, we might even say "omantic". —Andrew Zawack