Killing Plato

“I write / / to make the poisoned water / fit to drink.” —Chantal Maillard

Longlisted for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award

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 d...