After Villon in Bloomington, MN

There's no shame like morality no clarity like drunkenness no brutishness like a saint's no warning like a whisper no conviction like cynicism no pleasure like the whip no nostalgia like utopia no man as wise as one in love, From Dorothy livesay poetry prize finalist Roger Farr, After Villon, is a book of contemporary verse translations and "Queer Variations" based on the work of 15th century poete maudit Francois Villon. Villon's poetry, written in medieval French and incorporating the argot of the Parisian criminal underworld, is notoriously bawdy, opaque, and resistant to "straightforward" translation. Roger Farr's re-workings capture the in-group opacity in Villon's work. Subverting sex and gender, shifting pronouns, changing names, After Villon refuses the heteronormative assumptions all too often applied to the "gaps" in meaning of the original texts.