The Hand of the Hand

Laura Vazquez

Translated by Limited Connection Collective, Shira Abramovich, Lénaïg Cariou

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $20 $18

May 2025
Read an excerpt

I BRING YOU THE HONEY

The residents close their doors. It is evening now.

I cook for you, with a little oil,
 with a little lemon, with fresh herbs.
 I give you both my hands, you give me
 a few strawberries, it is your favorite season, the light is thick,
 the neighbors are asleep,
 the dogs are licking their fur.

I give you a little milk,
 the meat must be well done.
 The apples must be well done,
 we find them very tender.
 They are full of the water,
 full of sugars and of red.
 We must stir our soups and our stomachs when they fall asleep.

The evening keeps our saliva in its little mouth, it sinks into our eyes, you don’t say much, it sinks into our cheeks, the evening, your eyes are fragile, they are black, they sink into the kitchen.

I set down a pot of honey, it is night on the table.

The Hand of the Hand brings us to a future or an alternate universe in which earth, animal, and human intertwine—where stomachs have meadows, milk pours itself over trees, and flies wash the dead. Vazquez pulls deceptively simple, bare language into puzzling formations, creating an ambient unease. By turns lyrical and absurd, The Hand of the Hand explores the mystery and strangeness of what it means to be both speech and body, tongue and dirt.

About the Author

Laura Vazquez (1986–) is a French poet. A 2023 recipient of the Prix Goncourt, considered the highest literary honor in France, she has published seven poetry collections since her 2014 debut with La Main de la main, which itself won her the Prix de la Vocation for young poets. She leads the poetry journal Muscle, where she has published poets such as Cole Swensen, Kenneth Goldsmith, Michèle Métail, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Santiago Papasquiaro, and Frédéric Forte. Her poetry, characterized by its polyvocal and sonic play with spare language, has previously been translated into eight languages, not including English.

Praise

In this knockout first collection in English, Laura Vazquez shows us the simplicity and the complexity of the real. But what is the real? It’s these poems, written right on the very skin of it, where the human and everything else feel it. These poems, like Lucretius’, explain the world to us at the granular, allowing us to see these strange perceptions and arrangements of body (‘I folded my tongue, the way I know how’) in all its pleasure and wonder.

Eleni Sikelianos

The tentacular porousness of Laura Vazquez’s début collection sweeps selfhood off its feet with this young and now star poet from Perpignan, based in Marseille. In this spunky grounded word-world, she feels foxes in her breasts, octopi in her neck. Savvy collective translators Shira Abramovich and Lénaïg Cariou catch the sleights of hand, a magic of added prepositions and shape-shifting with language. Readers are actors in this oral page performance, catching the grit of mp3 players and birds’ teeth under the earth. When the amalgam of these three women says I felt the volcano, you feel it too. This is urgent music to cross the Atlantic—so moved that Ugly Duckling Presse has reached for the hand of the hand, and come out with the fierce eloquence of a split tongue.

Sarah Riggs

This remarkable and subtle poetic series moves continually outward—one thing leads to another and another, gaining momentum until its evocations achieve a true fusion of body and world. Whether through forests, ants, stones, or words, it’s a fusion that allows the reader, too, to become one with the world as a unified gesture, and it’s the hand—as bridge, as touch, as grasp—that animates this gesture, this hand that seems ubiquitous, which, in fact, it is. The Limited Connection Collective has captured it all in their superb translation and framed it with a particularly insightful introductory note.

Cole Swensen

About the Translators

Limited Connection Collective/Connexion Limitée is a French-American translation collective founded in 2019, out of a desire to open contemporary US-American poetics to the French literary scene and vice-versa. Currently, the collective is based in France, the United States, and Canada. They have translated works by poets such as Mónica de la Torre, Cole Swensen, Eleni Sikelianos, Kay Gabriel, and Adrienne Rich into French; Laura Vasquez’s The Hand of the Hand is their first translation from French to English.

Shira Abramovich is a translator, editor, and interdisciplinary researcher in Montréal. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Kernel Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Reboot, among others. With Limited Connection Collective, she is the co-translator of The Happy End/All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre (Joca Seria, 2022) and The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (L’Arche, 2025). Her translation and research has been recognized by the Fulbright Scholarship and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is very happy with her first name.

Lénaïg Cariou is a poet, translator and critic. As a poet, she published À main levée (LansKine) and La poésie n’est pas une bonne fille (Le Coin de la rue de l’Enfer, with Liliane Giraudon and Maxime Hortense Pascal) ; her third book, les dires (P.O.L.) is forthcoming. With Limited Connection Collective, she translates North American poetry into French and vice versa; together, they translated works by Cole Swensen, Mónica de la Torre, Eleni Sikelianos, Laura Vazquez, Adrienne Rich, and Kay Gabriel. Her critical work focuses on French and American contemporary poetry; she is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 8 / Université Paris Cité, and received the Young Researcher Prize from Fondation des Treilles for her current research on poetry.

Links

Four poems in Asymptote

Reading with Mónica de la Torre

Interview with La vie sans principe (en français)

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-45-3
Trade Paperback
128 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: May 01 2025