Oxo

by Pierre Alféri

Poetry. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen. The word "oxo" means, literally, "a bouillon cube," and this book of fine, spare poetry becomes a conceptual cube-- seven sections of seven poems, with each poem composed of seven lines of seven syllables. At the same time, the inclusion of Suzzan Doppelt's seven photographs render it a kind of "flip-book" of verbal and visual snapshots of life in contemporary Paris: its tourists, its homeless, its politicians, its TV news, its pigeons, and its poetry. "studied or not the gesture/ with which she laces up her/ naked back and calves baked on/ the beach evokes the damsel/ victim across the railroad/ tracks of thes silent slap with/ a stick on the ass slapstick"-- from `vacationer.'

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2004

About the author

Pierre Alféri (French: [pjɛʁ alfeʁi]; 10 April 1963 – 16 August 2023) was a French novelist, poet, and essayist. Alféri was the son of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier.