Killing Plato
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The two sequences of this book form a braided ars poetica: "Killing Plato" and "Writing." The first is a numbered sequence of twenty-eight poems organized around an accident: a pedestrian has been hit by a truck and is dying in the middle of the road. Various characters appear--the philosopher Michel Serres, Robert Musil, a woman smoothing out her stocking, the truck driver, a boy on a balcony, the Spanish poet Jesús Aguado. At the bottom of the page another tale unfolds: a woman bumps into an old friend, a male poet who has written a book called Killing Plato about "a woman who has been knocked over by the force of a sound." "Writing," the second part, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on mortality and literary production.
Chantal Maillard
Chantal Maillard (born 1951) is a contemporary Spanish poet and philosopher. With a long repertoire behind her, she has received various literary prizes for her poetry. She was awarded the Spanish National Poetry Prize in 2004 for Matar a Platón and the National Critic's Prize for Spanish Poetry in 2007 for Hilos. Her prose is particularly notable for merging and transgressing literary genres. Until 2000, she was a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Málaga. She has written articles on philosophy, aesthetics and Eastern Thought for several publications such as ABC and El País. Maillard has also worked on stage and adapted her works to various interdisciplinary projects, in collaboration with visual and stage artists, musicians, and filmmakers from Spain and around the world. Her latest published books include: La compasión difícil (Galaxia Gutenberg), ¿Es posible un mundo sin violencia (Vaso roto), La herida en la lengua (Tusquets), and India (Pre-textos).
Yvette Siegert
Translated by
The poet Yvette Siegert has also translated The Reef by Juan Villoro and Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry collections A Musical Hell, Diana’s Tree, and Extracting the Stone of Madness, for which she won the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.
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