Poetry. Translated by Sarah O'Brien. The role of proper names and their power over both named and namer is a subject Sekiguchi has addressed in her critical work. Now she returns to the theme in these poetic prose blocks. Set in a Portuguese botanical garden, they reconstruct the plant, animal, and aviary worlds through the lens of language--a Wittgensteinian language that dreams of impossible precision while actually constructing a kaleidoscope that interleaves the boundaries of its subjects until the myriad forms that life can assume become a single, triumphant category. Ryoko Sekiguchi was born in Tokyo. She received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Tokyo, and has lived in Paris since 1997, where she teaches at the Paris Research Center for Oriental Languages. She writes in both Japanese and French and has published seven collections of poetry.

Ryoko Sekiguchi was born in Tokyo in 1970. At an early age she began to write poetry in both Japanese and French, and when she was eighteen she received the Tokyo Literature Prize of "Cahiers de la poésie contemporaine". Since 1997 she has lived in Paris, where she studied Art History at the Sorbonne. Three years later she completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo. Today she teaches at various institutes including INALCO, the Paris Research Centre for Oriental Languages and Civilisations.