Partisan of Things

“ There is no escape from trees by means of trees.” The ordinary objects to which Francis Ponge directs his attention— a tree, an oyster, a cigarette— come uncannily alive in his seminal first book of prose poems, newly translated. Published in 1942, as Ponge was enlisting in the Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, these poems offer their own dryly humorous resistance to our tendency to take “ things” for granted as either dead matter or as commodities for our disposal. Arch, alive, and unexpectedly profound, here is a new Ponge for the age of hyperobjects and the revenge of nature, a poet of the Anthropocene avant la lettre. Translated from the French by  Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau.

Francis Ponge (1899-1988) famously countered Surrealism's fixation on "the marvelous" with a denuded objectivity, and went on to become one of the most influential French poets of the 20th Century. His 1942 book  Le parti pris des choses  is considered a literary classic.