A Few Microseconds on Earth

Poetry. Translated by Pauline Levy Valensi. In this English debut, French poet Perrin Langda offers poems with equal parts surrealism and satire. Sex, global warming, video games, gentrification, and all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism are illuminated in Langda's microcosmic poems, composed in ecstatic flashes. Pauline Levy Valensi's skillful translation captures the irony and rhythm of these inventive lyrics, wherein "man emerges from mud / like a zombie and grills / the blood of the planet / which goes up in smoke."