The life and writing of poets Anne Carson and Nicole Brossard do not invite comparison: Brossard has engaged in formal experimentation at the forefront of an anglophone-francophone dialogue about the personal and political, centred on feminism; whereas, Carson is unaligned with l'écriture féminin or any national or transnational literary movement. Yet, in the two poets' re-visioning of the way women gaze at women's bodies (including their own) these writers have significant resonance. In so doing, their work, such as Brossard's Journal intime (1998) and Carson's "Irony Is Not Enough" (2000), bridges the dichotomy of literature and visual culture, especially pictorial experience as theorized by Roland Barthes. The two poets draw on multiple languages and a shared intertextual palimpsest of European modernist literature and art house cinema to create a reflexive intimacy to the author's persona and to the female bodies in the text.
