Chantal Maillard

Poet

(c) Bernabé Fernández)

Chantal Maillard

Chantal Maillard is a poet, translator, and essayist, and has won both the Premio Nacional de Poesía (for Killing Plato) and the Premio Nacional de la Crítica.

cover image of the book Killing Plato

Killing Plato

by Chantal Maillard

Translated by Yvette Siegert

The two sequences of this book form a braided ars poetica: “Killing Plato” and “Writing.” The first is a numbered sequence of twenty-eight poems organized around an accident: a pedestrian has been hit by a truck and is dying in the middle of the road. Various characters appear—the philosopher Michel Serres, Robert Musil, a woman smoothing out her stocking, the truck driver, a boy on a balcony, the Spanish poet Jesús Aguado. At the bottom of the page another tale unfolds: a woman bumps into an old friend, a male poet who has written a book called Killing Plato about “a woman who has been knocked over by the force of a sound.” “Writing,” the second part, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on mortality and literary production.

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