Bringing together poetry published during the last six years, Strange Attractors is the most recent and extensive collection by the Prague-based award winning writer Louis Armand. Armand’s themes shift between New York cityscapes and the Moroccan desert; from dissections of contemporary aesthetics, philosophy and politics, to reflections on human intimacy, the sympathetic faculty and violence. Among the most prolific and widely received poets of his generation, Armand’s work has been described by Miroslav Holub as luminous with verbal innovation and critical insight. As the editor firstly of the Prague Revue and later of the PLR (Prague Literary Review) – Armand has participated in, and often presided over, many of the literary transformations and reformations of the decade since communism’s collapse in central Europe. At the same time, Armand’s work has remained strongly internationalist, eschewing the facile temptations of literary nationalism This volume confirms Armand’s standing as a major figure of the Prague renaissance and the post-fin-de-siècle of English-language poetry internationally.
