"La femme aux yeux orange." in Berlin Lit

A text-mask to celebrate the publication of a new poem, "La femme aux yeux orange.," in the latest edition of berlin lit. Thank you to Editor Matthew McDonald for selecting it. I haven’t often been called "crazy" or "folle," but I have been sometimes by men deemed "stubborn," which in the equation of words appears to me rather like another exercise in disqualifying a woman’s position or intellect. What I’ve always loved about Hélène Bessette’s poetic novel Si – probably her most existential and philosophical – is how much the page and object is crafted to catch the woman, Désira in this case, in her stance, in what I term her "rational lunacy." My poem wants to rejoice in that with letting the Bessettian mood elongate through time, through other miseries. Yes, rejoice. Indulgence like obliteration.

You can ravish yourself in all of issue 11 here.

New Poem (after Hélène Bessette) in Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 113

Translation in the key of /ɔː/ as in the key of /uː/. The allness of flaw. And la tous-talité du tort. Je me suis loupée avec une Française comme je me suis loupée avec moi-même. Bredouilleuse. Officially, formally, syllabically. This is the state of the déformaduction, mes déformaductions. The failed and failing state, the ruined tongue and the ruined body of the woman writer. Who is ready to off it all because much has been offed for her. The seduction of leaning into that, the bitter pleasure. Like going to bed alone, you and a word, while the perverted past still perverting, doctrine barely sloughed off, tolls and tolls through the voisinage.

It occurs to me today — in the wake of April, National Poetry Month, and what the U.S. does in celebrating poets by encouraging steady novelists to feed the electric verse of poets into the steady lens of their selfie hands — that Bessette, poet trying to make the novel howl, was a blues writer. That the poetic novel is a blues form. Making simple language and repetition cantankerous with song, though we’ve sometimes said "shouts," against the backdrop of a convoluting and hallucinating world, often mainstayed, righted by the narcissism of market fiction Bible-beating itself into ecclesiastic orders of "art."

In my new piece, I borrow from the pantoum form to travel through variations in repetition and blues. With lines of new and old refrain. Across language, time, condition. Thank you to the Editors of Painted Bride Quarterly, especially Dagne Forrest, for seeing the soul of this text and giving it a home. An audio recording (as well as the full poem, of course) appears on the site.

Contribution post-face pour la nouvelle anthologie de Sandra Moussempès

Heureuse d’avoir reçu mon exemplaire de Chambre obscura: Anthologie augmentée (1994-2026) par Sandra Moussempès, livre pour lequel j’ai eu le plaisir de contribuer un essai poétique — « La Double écriture de Sandra Moussempès » — sur mon expérience de lecture de Cassandra à bout portant. Merci toujours à Sandra de m’avoir permis, à travers ses poèmes, une délectation plus profonde de ce lieu textuel féminin où nous sommes dignes de comploter et de nous venger en toute extase.

Vous pouvez vous commander le votre chez Éditions MF.

Depuis 'My Doleful Grammar' : au sein de la cartographie d’une lignée bessettienne

Mercredi prochain j'aurai l'opportunité de parler de mes travaux en cours en recherche-création avec une présentation intitulée "Depuis 'My Doleful Grammar' : au sein de la cartographie d’une lignée bessettienne." C’est une question de poétique de la rupture, d’écrire avec, et surtout contre, un temps, une origine et le « bazar » général des choses. 

Je me réjouis d’entendre les communications de AMarie Petitjean, poupeh missagh, Rita Cássia Silva et Romy Castro. Merci à Yannicke Chupin et Fumiko Sugie pour toute votre organisation. 

"Écritures en circulation mémoire, langues, filiations" est le tout premier séminaire de l'axe 4 en recherche-création du laboratoire Héritages : culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s. (Vous pouvez assister en personne ou en ligne mais vous devez vous inscrire.

"English Translation" published in Lunch Ticket's Amuse Bouche, March 2026

Written in a spell of Bessettian defiance and calling on the sardonic airs that could suture it, this poem is not against her English translation, far from it. Rather, it tugs at some irony, for the woman who despised the vapidity of mainstream publishing (yes, this from she who landed herself in between the sanctimonious hands of Queneau and those of the Gallimard brothers - but maybe there all the ammunition for her argument) and the reductionist impulses that win over in trying to make a book go ‘boum.’

Still, this piece also bleeds into the margins of real-life, an experience of years, from 2017 onward, when information surrounding Bessette’s work was hard to find and those who were working on her memory — like Laure Limongi and Julien Doussinault and the resurrected GRP — were distant contacts and/or yet unknown to me. This poem is written into the Bessettian riddle of that time and all those worried looks shed on my body, with its wobbly-voiced French, as it begged to find traces of a woman no one had heard of. Yes, sprung from the heels of that and a lyric ‘I’ still desperate to wrench towards the wry.

Thank you to the editors of Lunch Ticket. You can read the full text here.

Bessette dans la foule: Soirée Hélène Bessette

Mercredi prochain le 1 avril 2026, à 20h le Gang du roman poétique (le GRP) — Anaïs de Courson, Claudine Hunault, Cédric Jullion, Rémi Letourneur, Benoît Virot et moi-même — sera à la Libraire Le Nouvel Équipage pour parler de l’œuvre d’Hélène Bessette, propice comme toujours, à l’heure où le sentiment fasciste progresse en Europe et ailleurs. En compagnie de la nouvelle réédtion de maternA, roman sans paysage et sans homme. J’espère vous y voir nombreuses et nombreux.

Greg Bem's Review of Cassandra at point-blank range in Exacting Clam

“Translated with an astute attention to detail, and crisp, continuous tonality, Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy have offered us a glimpse into the amorphous and readily engaged mind of Moussempès across a patchwork of fever dream spaces, where reality twists and turns, and language is the cohesive element binding shared experience, necessary history, and the grim but defiant inquiry of conflict and resistance, together.”

—Greg Bem, in Exacting Clam, No. 20, Spring 2026

Read the full review here.

Cassandra at point-blank range
Sandra Moussempès
Diálogos, April 2025

Buy with the publisher.

INTERVENANTE À UNE JOURNÉE D'ÉTUDE: ÉCRIVAINES OUVRIÈRES, PAYSANNES ET PRÉCAIRES

Mercredi prochain, je participerai à une réflexion collective sur les écrivaines de la précarité. Je présenterai à cette occasion ma recherche sur l’œuvre d’Hélène Bessette, et en particulier les idées formelles qui se cristallisent dans son roman poétique Ida ou le délire. Merci à Alexis Buffet et Victoria Pleuchot pour l’invitation. Le programme complet.

"I fondle the accidental." published in Pamenar Press Magazine

No, “fondle” does not mean “frôle.” And yet, “fondle” is the word “frôle” sends me. Perhaps it is the pipe of the f’s. Or the o’s scoping out over time in notes, blanches ou rondes. But I think it is more the difference of touch. The way, in my woman’s life, “fondle” came up in events otherwise called “accident” or “accidental”:

“You touched my breast!” “It was an accident!” “You practically fondled it!” “I just brushed up against you!”

The difference of a word’s touch. In scenarios organizing themselves for someone’s narrative salvation and another’s oblivion.

This poem is one in a collection I’m either terming The Entrancelations or Les Déformaductions, wherein I extract lines from the novels of Hélène Bessette and play with their sonic double edge as pressed against the text of me. Yes, it is personal. No, it is not an official translation.

Je trahis l’officiel.

Trêve de poësie.

It is also, perhaps, a reclaiming. Pour “L’héroïne. De mauvaise humeur.”

I have one just out in Pamenar Press Magazine. It arrives in a very westernized pantoum form (that lunges forward and pirouettes back) and allows me to card across the strophes different linguistic fibers. Fanny-Foo Foo is my creation. Perhaps to become recurring. Who, like many a Bessettian woman, changes form and denomination. But all the time. And most certainly her relationship to “l’accident.” And thusly “l’intentionnel.” Yes, thusly.

Thank you very much to Ghazal Mosadeq, for accepting it into the Internet pages of her wonderful cross-cultural and multilingual space.

" 'Dans ces beiges très confortables.' " published in Up the Staircase Quarterly

Thank you to Editor April Michelle Bratten of Up the Staircase Quarterly for selecting my poem —" 'Dans ces beiges très confortables.,' " written after Hélène Bessette's Ida ou le délire — to appear in Issue 71. I first drafted this poem in November 2018.

Thank you to Bessette for the spectacular portent of her work, for calling our beige bluff, and for the "Mi-ombre. Mi-lumière." of Ida.

I hope you’ll have a look at all of Issue 71, which is now home to work from Rita Mookerjee, Maddie Barone, Rayne Alarcio, James King, Ophelia Wen, Mk Smith Despres, Vikki C., Lizzy Ke Polishan, and Michelle Li, a cover drawing from Lauren Rinaldi and watercolors by Julie Epp.

French Women Writers in Translation, Hosted by Ivy Writers Paris and The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore

Amanda Murphy and I were delighted to participate in French Poetry in Translation, a joint translation event hosted by Ivy Writers Paris and The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore, and share our co-translation of Cassandra at point-blank range by Sandra Moussempès (Diálogos 2025). We joined Virginie Poitrasson and Michelle Noteboom along with Stéphanie Chaillou and Laura Mullen who presented respectively The Unlikeness of Things (Litmus Press 2025) and something happens (Diálogos 2025).

Below are a few photos from the event.

Amanda Murphy, Sandra Moussempès, and Carrie Chappell after their “braided reading” of Cassandra at point blank-range, Cassandre à bout portant, with Ivy Writers Paris and The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.

Virginie Poitrasson and Michelle Noteboom about to read from The Unlikeness of Things, Le pas-comme-si des choses, with Ivy Writers Paris and The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.

Stéphanie Chaillou and Laura Mullen in tandem from something happens, quelque chose se passe, with Ivy Writers Paris and The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.

Best of the Net Nomination — "Girl à feuilles caduques"

I’m touched that Stone Circle Review and Editor Lee Potts have nominated my erotic ecosonnet, "Girl à feuilles caduques,” for Best of the Net. Sending warm wishes to all nominees.

"Au tombeau d'Hélène Bessette" on YouTube

“Au tombeau d’Hélène Bessette” is a poem I wrote at her grave, on September 22, 2025. Here it is recorded and self-translated. The text can be found here, on my Substack.

something happens at point-blank range: a special Diálogos event

Poetry and hybrid writing from contemporary French women writers!

Amanda Murphy and I will be presenting our co-translation of Cassandra at point-blank range by Sandra Moussempès alongside Laura Mullen who will be releasing her translation of something happens by Stéphanie Chaillou. Both are new releases from Lavender Ink / Diálogos.

Join us for an online reading and discussion. 2pm CST and 21h Paris-time. Hope to see you out in the out there.

Event access info:

Zoom link: https://nolapoetry.zoom.us/j/89632893351
Meeting ID: 896 3289 3351

In the Woods Called Karen on YouTube

"In the Woods Called Karen" is a poem I wrote between Paris and the mountains of Aigues-Vives, over a few months, moving "white-haired commas" here and there. It was originally recorded for and published in Voicemail Poems back in November 2019. Integral to its composition was the 1970s footage of Dalton at her Colorado home. The stills appearing on this video’s cover come from that 1970s documentary which paired Dalton’s recording of "Blues Jumped The Rabbit" with her preparing something in her kitchen, strumming her guitar, and running through the mountains. The documentary was purportedly filmed for French television by Greek filmmaker, radio producer, and poet Roviros Manthoulis. I’m resurrecting the text here in a sort of personal research project into what I’m doing in my poetics by visiting all of these mis-visited women artists.

Three New Poems in Westerly Magazine

On May 1, 2025, Issue 69.2 of Westerly Magazine released from the University of Western Australia. I am proud to have three new poems — all entitled “Motherhood Poem” and decidedly challenging the sweetness expected of any woman writing through the birthing and parenting experience — in its pages. I encourage you all to check out this gorgeous issue and to follow the work of this uniquely curious and invested editorial team. You can purchase a hard copy or PDF version of the journal here.

« Poème du stérilet » released for the last day of Women's History Month

On this last day of Women’s History Month, I wanted to share the release of a new poem via Spiritual Material: Musings from Second-Hand, Parisian Wardrobe. I’ve made a video to accompany it, English subtitles included. Thank you for watching!

Panelist on Translating Poetry at the New Orleans Poetry Festival — April 2025

This April, I am thrilled to be returning to New Orleans as a panelist on Translating Poetry: Between Authenticity and Creativity at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Lisa Pasold will be hosting Frédéric Forte, Amanda Murphy, Michelle Noteboom, Virginie Poitrasson, and myself as we discuss “how [our] individual [approaches to translation] confront bilingualism, intermedial translation, and the question of authenticity.”

Amanda and I will follow this panel with a presentation of our co-translation of Cassandra at point-blank range at the Lavender Ink / Diálogos reading. Hope to see you on Saturday, April 12th at Café Istanbul.

Guest Poet at Nicolette Daskalakis's Launch for Tell Me I'm Not on Fire

On Friday, January 31, 2025, I’ll be reading a few poems to open the launch event for Nicolette Daskalakis’ Tell Me I’m Not on Fire. I hope you’ll come out to celebrate Nicolette’s newest collection. We’ll see you at 19h at Galerie Echomusée (21 rue Cave, 75018).

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Thong" on YouTube

This past August, I wrote and recorded “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Thong” for Spiritual Material: Musings from My Second-Hand, Parisian Wardrobe.