Tarnac, a preparatory act

Author: Jean-Marie Gleize

Translators: Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang, and Bonnie Roy

Publisher: Kenning Editions (2014)

Published in 2011, Tarnac, un acte préparatoire interrogates in poetic form the fallout from and precedent for the notorious cause célèbre of the “Tarnac Nine”—associated with the Invisible Committee, pseudonymous authors of The Coming Insurrection. It is Gleize's Anglo-American full-length debut, though as editor of the journal Nioques, he is well-known to American readers for, among other things, importing to France the work of some more daring poets from the US. In translation, Tarnac, a preparatory act not only lends insight into radical aesthetic politics that characterize ongoing transatlantic—indeed global—intellectual affinities, but it introduces to American readers an inestimably important figure of French letters. A book such as this is long overdue and perfectly timely at once.