[04/01/25] Sanguinetti, Hélène / Cefola, Ann (tr.): Alparegho, Like Nothing Else

Beautiful Days Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Alparegho, Like-nothing-else is a nearly unclassifiable mock-epic poem that unfolds in seven parts. We follow our titular hero, without country or face, on a quest for self-discovery through a hallucinatory, apocryphal realm of snails, claws, blackened teeth, and flames. With nods to Orpheus, Dante, René Char, La Fontaine, and the French courtly tradition, Hélène Sanguinetti’s poem seems sculpted from the tattered materials of some primordial past, but sung by a choir from an alternate future. These multivocal chants and fables meet syntactic disruption, typographic play, and shards of totemic imagery in Sanguinetti’s protean, sui generis form. Reissued twice in France since it first appeared in 2005, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else is the third of Sanguinetti’s books to be translated into English by Ann Cefola.