The Peacock Emperor Moth

Originally published by Gallimard in 1990, this ninth release in Burning Deck's translations of new French writing, serie d'ecriture, presents 100 short vignettes of the thinking person's everyday life, where one is often overwhelmed by the banality of one's own epiphanies. The flattened existential wonderment of the characters, rendered by poet Corman as hard-boiled to the point of parody, confronts contemporary European life and reminders of the Holocaust with a detachment that restrains (sometimes just barely) rushes of hope: ""Yes, I'm waiting for something like a groundswell, but it won't happen.'' Cohen's work is filled with the complexities of chance, the unreliability of memory, the dross of relationships-in short, the shaky underpinnings of human consciousness.(Mar.)