Hitting the Streets

Taxi drivers, street sweepers, a bouquiniste, unsuccessful prostitutes, a menaced bicycle rider, noisy children, an old woman shunted aside in a crowd, and some disgruntled animals at the zoo populate these poems. Unreeling like a series of clips recorded during a stroll through Paris, the book is wickedly funny, but it is also a bittersweet meditation on how "the river of forgetfulness carries away the city." This is the poet's love letter to Paris—a Paris that is always in the process of becoming superannuated. Rachel Galvin’s lively, idiomatic version is the first complete translation available in English.

Raymond Queneau was a novelist, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and translator, and a leading figure in 20th-century French literary life. He cofounded OuLiPo, a group of experimental writers and mathematicians whose members included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, in 1960, and it is the longest running literary group in French history. Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, editor, and academic who teaches comparative literature at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of a collection of poems, Pulleys & Locomotion. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.