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.