Book excerpt: "White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world."—Le Devoir Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie." Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.