Stéphanie Garzanti offers sixty-one poems written off-key, like singing off-key at karaoke, caring little about accuracy but with enthusiasm, putting her whole heart into it.
The alexandrines are alexandrines only in their number of feet but ignore the caesura at the hemistich, with no truly regulation quatrains, nor organized sonnets, but free verse… or attempts at it.
The collection brings together enunciations, declarations, prismatic colors that radiate, all sorts of familiar species, domestic animals, and ordinary plants. It seeks unison without being sure of always achieving it. Stéphanie Garzanti thus reinvents, by transcending it, the nature/culture binary. All of this in a funny, offbeat, playful, and malleable language that the author/artist handles with a form of virtuosity and relish.
Exploring the five senses—plus a sixth as a bonus—it’s a book about solitude, the kind that makes you tame spiders and talk to flowers, a book about daily life, about observing the closest reality, and about love, the kind that gives you the impulse to dare poetry, to find a companion in it. An attempt to say, write and proclaim, to give rhythm back to desires. For Poèmes karaoké is also, and perhaps above all, a collection about mad and sensual love, about the waiting and distance that separate lovers.
