Love Is Colder than the Lake

“Vivid and flickering, this book by the leading light of contemporary experimental feminist poetics, Liliane Giraudon, is a live stream of striking images, both cinematic and hypnotizing. As it progresses, the recurrent image of the lake accumulates greater and greater charge as its possibilities, metaphoric, symbolic, and literal, proliferate. Giraudon grapples here with the tremendous weight of history in its many theaters, again both literal and figurative. The cast of characters is epic, the logic, poetic, and the whole, riveting. Riggs’ and Turner’s translation is as inventive as the work itself, perfectly capturing all its urgency, wry wit, and sharp perceptions—a remarkable feat.”

“A propulsive pastiche of ‘accumulated ghosts’ that shows that when ‘the grotesque has overcome all the rest,’ we can dig our way out through language, image, each other. An exploration of the past selves we are constructed on, and a cinematic, surprising staging of grief and lost love rendered electrically and filled with pleasing pops of ‘shrimp-pink’ and ‘crushing fierce yellows’ by translator-poet duo Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner who deftly braid together words of the English language to make a new one for Liliane Giraudon.”