Join us as we count down to the ALTA43: In Between awards ceremony with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose longlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for prose are Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. This year’s judges for poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk.

The awards ceremony will air on October 15, 2020 on ALTA’s Crowdcast page: you can register to attend the NTA in Prose announcement here, and the NTA in Poetry announcement here. Find the full list of longlisted titles here.

Today we’re shining the spotlight on NTA in Poetry longlisted title The Next Loves:

The Next Loves
by Stéphane Bouquet
translated from French by Lindsay Turner
(Nightboat Books)

Impulses to luxuriate in the present haunted by anticipated ends, philosophical interrogations made rigorous in pillow talk, and courageous bearing of the body’s—and the mind’s—availability to intimate impressions: Stéphane Bouquet’s The Next Loves serves all of these with a claim so light on the reader’s attention that the wanting it leaves is the surest sign of Bouquet’s mastery over the intertwined magic of language and seduction. Lindsay Turner’s brilliance as both poet and translator ensures that every slide across discourses, every rift between fragments, every long run across sequences built of verse or prose evokes Bouquet’s vast desire for vastness itself, as if to “speak / mouths directly in the midst of things.”