Pamphlets series

A book dry and stripped – written during a grave illness – in which death and pain, without literary concessions, palpitate on each one of her pages.

María Luisa Blanco, Babelia

Longlisted for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award

Killing Plato

Poetry 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.

(published Nov, 26 2019)

ISBN
9780811228992
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
64

A book dry and stripped – written during a grave illness – in which death and pain, without literary concessions, palpitate on each one of her pages.

María Luisa Blanco, Babelia