Marie de Quatrebarbes Poetry Soirée

About the Event:

This event will be in both French and English, and will be held at the Alliance Française of Washington, DC.

This event is part of our "Des Mots et des Hommes / Of Words and Men" series.

Come join us for an evening of French poetry with acclaimed author and poetess, Marie de Quatrebarbes. Marie will read from and discuss the recent English translation of her book, Les Vivres (The Vitals), an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one, making its debut with an English translation. Alongside her, we are pleased to welcome her English translator, Aiden Farrell. Together, they will discuss The Vitals' rich and poetic content, and answer questions from the audience. In partnership with local French bookstore Bonjour Books, copies for purchase will be available at this event. We are looking forward to your participation!

About the Book:

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’s poem persists suspended in the space left by a sudden disappearance.

About the Author:

Marie de Quatrebarbes (b. 1984) is the author of several books of poetry, as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, and the recipient of the 2020 Paul-Verlaine Prize from the Academie Française. 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. She lives and works in Paris.