Louis Jacques Napoléon Bertrand, better known by his pen name Aloysius Bertrand, was a French Romantic poet, playwright and journalist. He is famous for having introduced prose poetry in French literature, and is considered a forerunner of the Symbolist movement. poems
by Aloysius Bertrand: The thumb is this fat Flemish innkepper, mocking and saucy, who smokes by his door, beneath the sign of the double March beer.
“They stand apart in this world, / each one with his night, / each one with his death, / morose, bareheaded, hoarfrost-covered” | by Paul Celan
“How I love to lie down in this field—in myself: / myself in hiding, then disappearing.” | by Patrice de La Tour du Pin
PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN (1911-1975) was best known in France for the three-volume multi-genred work entitled Une somme de poésie, and several shorter books of poetry, including Psaumes de tous mes temps, which collects the psalms he wrote and revised throughout his life. poems
Painter and poet HAMID TIBOUCHI, born in 1951 in Tibane (Algeria), has lived and worked in France since 1981. As a visual artist, he has exhibited at around sixty solo shows, and nearly three hundred group exhibitions, in France and around the world. His abundant production takes multiple forms—paintings, drawings, etchings, photos, artist books, object …
“a little like how a sentry in the night / paces to keep himself awake” | Selections from poet-artist Hamid Tibouchi’s Nervures in English and French.
by Hédi Kaddour: Damn the almanac-makers who leave you / stuck between debts and death
by Hédi Kaddour: No ocean, no rhymes, the prudent / mountain, long walks and sometimes / when we thought too highly of ourselves / a huge bovine herd, just before the slap
Chocolates, beer, pâté, whiskey, cookies, she watches them stuff it away and the girl, already drunk, bright red, insults her, threatens to sock her in the face, old bag, they laugh, they shout Thief! The security guards come, grab her, the others laugh harder, she exclaims Not me! It’s them! The guards frisk, the girl …
by Dana Roeser: Like a goat / in a stall / with a thoroughbred / a truffle sealed/ in a plastic / bag
By Dana Roeser: The key to this life is / surprise. Don’t say / my whole life is spent / trying to reunite / socks.
Poetry International 151/6
“Other Secrets of the Empty and the Full”
Poetry International 22/23
“[Once she had a book]”
Poetry International 6
“[He told stories the way you peel a fruit]”
Hédi Kaddour is a Tunisia-born French poet. His work, translated by Marilyn Hacket, was featured in Volume V of Poetry International.