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Seghers
EAN : 9782232145476
Shaping : EPUB3
DRM : Watermark (Tatouage numérique)
Collected Poems

Nancy Huston (préface de)
Collection : Poésie Seghers
Release date : 10/02/2022
“With this book, Seghers is making us a rare gift: the discovery of a poetic voice, probably one of the most important of the XXth century, unjustly ignored until now”.
Nancy Huston
The book:
Collected for the first time in one volume, the poems written by Grisélidis Real from age thirteen right until her death form a rare and powerful opus mirroring the artist’s extraordinary life. Born into a Calvinist middle class family in Geneva, Grisélidis Real loses her father at an early...
The book:
Collected for the first time in one volume, the poems written by Grisélidis Real from age thirteen right until her death form a rare and powerful opus mirroring the artist’s extraordinary life. Born into a Calvinist middle class family in Geneva, Grisélidis Real loses her father at an early age. As a teenager, she starts to revolt against her psychorigid mother and runs away from home. Living precariously, the poet and painter gives birth to four children, all fathered by different men, crosses with two of them illegally into Germany to be with her current lover who leaves her with nothing, out on the streets… Experiencing other passionate, sometimes violent, love affairs, she falls into and out of prostitution, eventually becoming an icon and representative of female prostitutes in their struggle for social recognition in the 1970s. Her life is also punctuated by repeated stays in care facilities and state institutions, from the sanatorium, she is sent to as a child suffering from tuberculosis, to the German prison she gets incarcerated in after a botched drug deal, and to the hospital she spends her last days in while dying of cancer. Four years after her interment, her remains are transferred to the prestigious Cimetière des Rois, which literally translates as “Graveyard of the Kings”, the resting ground where Geneva buries its most famous citizens. There, she is laid to her final rest between Calvin, her nemesis, and Borges, her most important artistic model.
 
All the challenging and harrowing, often even extreme experiences of Grisélidis’ life contribute to her great fecundity as an artist. During her lifetime, she has published numerous novels, stories, newspaper articles and letters from her correspondence. Yet of her poems, which are at the very core of her aesthetic creation, only a few have been published until this day. Incredibly rich in style, tone and subject matters, they range from the symbolist influences of her youth to novels in verse that narrate poignant experiences of her life as a prostitute as well as her battle with cancer in a uniquely profound and compelling way.
 
Key points:
The poetic creation of a highly relevant feminist activist, a poignant and compelling collection of works that will appeal to educated amateurs of poetry as well as to a new, more socially conscious and politically active public.
A perfectly timed publication that will create a large mediatic halo around the artist with the simultaneously published open letter to the author by renowned writer Nancy Huston – Reine
du Réel: Lettre à Grisélidis Réal, NiL 2022 – who also prefaced this new edition of collected poems, as well as exhibitions in Parisian galleries dedicated to Grisélidis Réal’s paintings.
 
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EAN : 9782232145476
Shaping : EPUB3
DRM : Watermark (Tatouage numérique)
Seghers