Marie de Quatrebarbes – The Vitals
Marie de Quatrebarbes
The Vitals
Translated from French by
AIDEN FARRELL
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
144 pages
May 15, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-32-1
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
MARIE DE QUATREBARBES (b. 1984) lives and works in Paris. She has published several books of poetry, including Voguer (P.O.L., Winner of the Academie Française’s Paul-Verlaine Prize, 2020), Les vivres (P.O.L.), and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She published La tête et les cornes, a poetry and translation review, republished the complete poems of Michel Couturier (L’ablatif absolu, La tête et les cornes), and edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women (Madame tout le monde, Le Corridor bleu). Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti.
AIDEN FARRELL is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. He has published two chapbooks: lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence), and his poetry and translations have been featured in Amygdala, Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, Asphalte Magazine, Wonder, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Futurepoem, and co-curates the Unnamed reading series with Ryan Cook. Born in Paris and raised between three continents, Aiden lives in Brooklyn. The Vitals is his debut translation.
PRESS
Marie de Quatrebarbes
The Vitals
Translated from French by
AIDEN FARRELL
Acclaimed French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ debut in English translation is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
As if the relic of a long-forgotten history, The Vitals ghosts through five successive months, measuring time through the vacillations of a bereaved consciousness. An estranged voice staggers through glimpses of childhood, domesticity, conversations lost and found, and memories reverberating into language. These elliptical prose vignettes ask questions about family, survival, and of the shared experience of grief and longing. Through a documentary impulse, de Quatrebarbes’ poem persists suspended in the space left by a sudden disappearance.
“How to unremember the details of grief in order to think, to exist past its consuming intensity? In intricately nested poem-boxes, Marie de Quatrebarbes dis-orders the sequences of experience to find new possibility in how to write into and of infinite moments within the imposed boundaries of a year. ‘I form a word for something with my mouth. I disremember myself.’ And in that dis-remembering, she dis-covers subtle tensions between interpretation, explanation and where/when perception might actually allow for illumination. ‘My gaze becomes what it is,’ she writes, and Aiden Farrell’s translations keep up, conveying in new language the complexity of life’s increasing accumulation of time.” —Marcella Durand
“Early on in this spirited and wildly inventive book, Marie de Quatrebarbes tells us ‘I’d like to write sentences that contain each other like Russian dolls.’ And so she does. The Vitals is constantly turning while each thought keeps cresting and cresting. The sentences simply just keep opening and there is no easy closure, only adventure. We are teetering at the edges of meaning, at the edges of language. This is a highly original orientation to the world. In this topsy-turvy tour de force, the poet tells us, ‘I live in this world.’ And now, miraculously, so do we.” —Peter Gizzi
“Marie de Quatrebarbes’s prose inventions are revelations of object relations set in motion via writing that bores into and refashions the logic of sentences. Early experience (childhood, youthful) retained in or haunting-through life’s and world’s events acts as a medium through which the extended poem approaches the complexity of musical arrangement. There is a sonorous vibrancy in this writing that makes available to thought, including political thought, what positive knowledge can’t register—a sense of intimacy within a world of perpetual disruption. In such a world, ‘There is no detail we could reduce to smaller units because there is no lesser detail.’ Gratitude to translator Aiden Farrell and World Poetry for giving us this marvelous en face edition.” —Carla Harryman
BIOS
MARIE DE QUATREBARBES (b. 1984) lives and works in Paris. She has published several books of poetry, including Voguer (P.O.L., Winner of the Academie Française’s Paul-Verlaine Prize, 2020), Les vivres (P.O.L.), and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She published La tête et les cornes, a poetry and translation review, republished the complete poems of Michel Couturier (L’ablatif absolu, La tête et les cornes), and edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women (Madame tout le monde, Le Corridor bleu). Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti.
AIDEN FARRELL is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. He has published two chapbooks: lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence), and his poetry and translations have been featured in Amygdala, Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, Asphalte Magazine, Wonder, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Futurepoem, and co-curates the Unnamed reading series with Ryan Cook. Born in Paris and raised between three continents, Aiden lives in Brooklyn. The Vitals is his debut translation.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
144 pages
May 15, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-32-1
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
