Red, Green & Black
Back Cover:
Red, Green & Black is almost (just about, quite like, virtually, similar
to) a translation of Cadiot's French "original," with this difference:
its life in "the American" hits the "target" just
as often as in the French. Olivier Cadiot — one of Paris' most provocative,
original, and funny new poets — teams up with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E's Charles
Bernstein to compose a poem noir, where it's never clear what's happening
or who done it -- only that a new kind of poetry from France has just
arrived.
"The game is grammatical, but the arrow hits: a real corpse decomposes.
Between repetition, tautology and quotation, falls dead silence. What
seems a sort of ready-made language (in which Charles Bernstein's playfulness
matches Cadiot's) turns out to be a carnival on top of `catastrophe/catastrophic'.
Need I add: a poem for our time?"
—Rosmarie Waldrop