Robert Polito
Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, Detour, D.O.A.—through titles and across content, classic noir semaphores repetition, impasse, entanglement, and terminus. The elegantly brutal, deadpan crime fictions of Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995), created in the reverberation of the events of May 1968 in Paris, exploded those distress signals into static and silence. A socialist from Marseille who began drifting around dissident Communist and Trotskyite fringes, the translator of American hard-boiled novels and the author of Notes noires columns for French newspapers and journals, Manchette crafted a sly rendition of Situationist détournement: a collage of redux plots that emerges as simultaneously a refinement 
Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure. Consider that he has no fixed abode; vanishes abroad, after the fashion of Valerie