Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart: Perfect Bound

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina Cook is a poet, translator, book critic, and writer. Her second book, Roaming the Labyrinth Within: The Poetry and Paris of Marie-Claire Bancquart, is forthcoming in Spring 2025 from AIM Higher Press. Her first book, the poetry collection A Strange Insomnia (Aldrich Press, 2016), was preceded by two chapbooks, Ricochet (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016) and Lake Effect (Finishing Line Press, 2012), the latter of which won the 2012 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in literary journals across the U.S., Europe, and Australia. She has served as a speechwriter for presidents of Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught writing at several universities and colleges. Christina lives in State College, PA, where, in addition to writing, she tends her perennial garden and practices astrology, Reiki, and Tarot. She and her husband, Jeff, have two grown sons.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Poets know how privileged they are to be translated by like-minded poets.Christina Cook’s accomplished translations of French poet Marie-ClaireBancquart are among the most sensual and nuanced versions I’ve encoun-tered. ButRoaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquartis morethan a work of translation presented bilingually: it is an original work ofhybrid writing, rich in its sources, narratives, extrapolations, and more.“In my poetry and my personal life, Marie-Claire taught me toengagewith my disbelief rather than suspend it,” writes Cook as she graceful-ly weaves her autobiographical prose and poetry through a well-curatedselection of Bancquart’s poems in translation. Voices, images, histories,timespaces multiply, dialoguing with one another against the backdropof Paris, music, mythology... This generous work celebrates the joyfulunion of writing and translation and pays homage to an enduring friend-ship between two women, born of a “language of desire”deep in the body.”

—Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Christina Cook’sRoaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquartblends literary criticism, memoir, and travelogue into a poignant and in-tegrated whole. The framing story is Cook’s one day and evening in Pariswith writer Marie-Claire Bancquart and her husband, composer AlainBancquart. Exquisite prose is enlivened with poems by Marie-Claire andChristina, making a book that honors the making of art.

—Natasha Sajé, author ofTerroir: Love, Out of Place

Part memoir, part biography, part translation, part poetry—ChristinaCook has created an enthralling hybrid text that gives an intimateglimpse of a major French poet and her influence on the author. Thepairing of Bancquart’s poems with Cook’s own poetry is especially illu-minating, as it shows how accomplished she is at capturing Bancquart’s voice rather than bending it through her own prism. I hope readers ofEnglish will fall in love with Bancquart through this book.

—Wendeline A. Hardenberg, translator ofWith Death,an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth,poems by Marie-Claire Bancquar

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

AIM Higher is a nonprofit press that publishes works that blur boundaries, negate binaries, interrogate, confound, and delight. We endeavor to open portals into unmapped and magical dimensions, and honor intuition and collaboration.