Nathalie Quintane was born in Paris in 1964 and is the author of over twenty books of experimental poetry and genre-defying prose. She famously wrote a book about a shoe, and ran a parody literary journal in the 1990s with Christophe Tarkos and Stéphane Bérard. In recent years (beginning with TOMATOES in 2009), her work has come to directly address particular political issues, including the plight of refugees in Europe, the gilets jaunes and Nuit debout movements, the Front nationale, and France's colonial legacies. Keenly aware of how aesthetics, language, and politics are related, she critiques political and critical languages and practices her own alternatives. Her style is incisive and droll, using wordplay to make cutting political arguments, and her texts have a light and vital energy that likely comes from her quasi-improvised approach to composition. Quintane is considered one of the major experimental poets of her generation; TOMATOES is only her second book-length work available in English, after Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais's translation of JOAM DARC (Fence Books/La Presse, 2017).