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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today we continue our series, an American bookworm in Paris, recorded recently when,

as a guest of the cultural services of the French embassy, I was in Paris for the very first time.

My guests today are poets Pierre Alferi and novelist Emmanuel Carrere. Here I am an American

in Paris at POL, the home of the avant-garde and the new in Parisian literature.

Today I am talking to Pierre Alferi.

He is a poet.

Now, as I understand it,

only the very tip of the iceberg of the works of Alferi

have been translated to American publishing.

What we have are two books, Natural Gates, which was published by Sun and Moon, which is now known as

Green Integer, and also 0x0.

A oxo.

I just thought of it as being like a tic-tac-toe board.

You could interpret it like that, but it was an invention of the translator, actually,

because the French title

refers to a brand of little soup cubes, you know, that dilute bouron cubes. And in French, the brand,

...