In French, ‘il,’ the third person masculine singular pronoun, can also have no gender at all: for instance, il pleut means ‘it’s raining.’ In Dominique Fourcade’s IL, ‘il’ means ‘it,’ but not exactly. The genderless ‘il’ is the man-woman, the woman-man, the place where we are each other and, in lieu of exploiting difference, the poet allows the sonority of the word to generate the curious masculine-feminine dialogue we all hear within us, if we listen.

Dominique Fourcade is the author of many volumes of poetry published by the influential publisher of contemporary experimental literature, P.O.L. He was awarded the Grand Prix National de Poésie in 1996 and is active in the world of 20th and 21st century art and has written extensively on Henri Matisse, Simon Hantaï, Pierre Buraglio, and others.

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