Author on Tour: Marie de Quatrebarbes
About Marie de Quatrebarbes
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). The Vitals (World Poetry, 2025) is her first book in English translation. Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti. She lives and works in Paris.
About The Vitals
(World Poetry, 2025)
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.
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 disorders 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 discovers 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.
The Vitals was released in the United States in May 2025.
Find more information here.
Schedule
Marie de Quatrebarbes’ public schedule will include:
- Monday, April 20: Event @ Villa Albertine, NY – event in English
- Wednesday, April 22: Event @ Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge, MA – event in English
- Friday, April 24: Event @ Alliance Française, Washington, DC – event in English
For more information, please email Noémie Jornet: noemie.jornet@villa-albertine.org