Finalist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award and the 2015 National Translation Award.
With photographs by Suzanne Doppelt.
Lazy Suzie furthers the project, developed in Suzanne Doppelt’s previous three books, of reframing and thus reinterpreting the received knowledge of scientific inquiry. Constructed around the principle of multiple perspectives, Lazy Suzie implicitly questions what distinguishes the scientific from other forms of inquiry through her textual and photographic engagement with the superstitious to the supernatural to the simply fraudulent. Turbulent, dizzying, even violent, Doppelt’s prismatic, off-kilter vision—reflected in her syntax, phraseology, and imagery—creates a dynamic of conviction and doubt, with the problematics of perception at the center.
Suzanne Doppelt is a well-known French photographer who has collaborated with various other artists and writers, including Georges Aperghis, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Anne Portugal. Director of the "Cabinet of Curiosities" series for the Parisian publisher Bayard and poetry editor for the cultural review Vacarme, she has held residencies with Inventaire-Invention, the Fondation Royaumont, and various other cultural institutions, and her photography has been in solo and group shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Le Centre Culturel of Bastia, L'Institut Français of Naples, Le Pavillon des Arts, L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nîmes, New York University, the Cabinet d'Art Graphique of the Louvre, and the Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris. The author of several titles in French, her books Vac Spectra (1913 Press, 2020), Lazy Suzie (Litmus Press, 2014), The Field is Lethal (Counterpath, 2011) and Ring Rang Wrong (Burning Deck, 2004) were translated by Cole Swensen.
Cole Swensen is the author of 20 volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over 20 volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.