Description
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Translation. "In OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS, ECHOIC, Chris Tysh newly translates Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, compressing Jean Genet's disturbing 1943 novel into cuttingly charged verse. In the blue hours of the Parisian underworld, pimps, drag queens, and butchers in bloody aprons are joined by Divine, Mignon Dainty-Feet, and the young assassin Our Lady, three saintly figures in a forbidden realm of the senses. Tysh cuts OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS, ECHOIC into a ghostly song that traces the path from prose to lyric where Divine switches gender and names "as if passing under a scarlet awning." Suturing sexual otherness to an aching of gendered expectations, Tysh's cadences embrace postmodernism's emblematic penchant for all manner of appropriation, and recycling finds a radical iteration in the fashion of fairies, queens, and stool pigeons.
"This volume of verse, played over by a flickering ghostly flame, is perhaps the book that Genet meant to write..."—John Tranter
Author Bio
Poet and playwright Chris Tysh is the author of several collections of poetry and drama, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kresge Foundation. Her latest projects include DERRIDA'S IN/VOICE (BlazeVOX books, 2020) and HOTEL DES ARCHIVES: A TRILOGY (Station Hill Press, 2018) which features verse "transcreations" from the French novels of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras. With Detroit filmmaker Oren Goldenberg, she has collaborated on a cin�-poem, Alms of the Night. She teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Author City: DETROIT, MI USA