Life in Suspension: La Vie Suspendue (English and French Edition)

Winner of the 2017 International Book Award in Poetry, the 2017 Best Book Award in Poetry, the Pinnacle Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book and the Readers' Favorite Book Award in Poetry. Finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award, the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and the Julie Suk Award."A magic carpet ride, not like anything else around."
--Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books"A vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse." --John Ashbery "In this bilingual edition of her poems Hélène Cardona is our contemporary ecstatic, time-traveler, and shape-shifter. Behind the dreamlike atmosphere of her poems lies a fierce will to discover beauty, to resurrect ancient enchantments, and to defend enigmas of the spirit. "I like transforming into an animal, / devouring who I was," she writes. Her luminous poems celebrate the imagination's power to dignify and exalt our highest yearnings." --Lee Upton "A tour de force of language and phonetics; a deeply felt and deeply spiritual collection which explores the universal human experience from a very personal point of view. This is intimate poetry, and yet it transcends the mundane through its lyricism and its glory in language. Hélène Cardona's pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and magical." --Joanne Harris
"Each poem fully exists in two tongues at once, and this adds to the book's great charm and visionary quality."
--Richard Wilbur"A tender, pensile world, that merits repeated line by line explorations." --The Los Angeles Review"Extraordinary, magical, and poignant." --Guy Sangster-Adams, The Cultural PickPraise for Hélène Cardona:"This is a poet who writes in a rare light." --David Mason"Hélène Cardona's poetry is simultaneously rapturous and lucid." --The London Magazine"Breathless, enraptured, and to borrow a phrase once used by Charles Tomlinson brilliantly to describe the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, 'self-wearing'." --Caitríona O'Reilly, Poetry Salzburg Review