Preorder ‡ Nadia de Vries, All My Dead Jesters
£15.50
Tenement #25 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-13-9
79pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
05.03.26
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A thatch of old works and new; of
jokes that landed well, and others that
sank; a suite of swans that cannot swim;
a paean to Nike as she refutes her name,
and trades ‘Victory!’ as a leading connotation
for the aura and atmosphere of νεῖκος /
neîkos / strife; forty-nine hands on a tired,
analogue body.
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With aphorism, deep pith and humour, Nadia de Vries delivers her sly lines and contrarian point of view with great force, making an uncomfortable music.
Peter Gizzi
de Vries is a poet of barbed brevity, brutal idiom, figgety desire and delicious deadpan, like fresh white spit on a patent leather shoe. What can you do but hold up your fist of horns and believe her entirely?
Jack Underwood
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All My Dead Jesters is an assembly of select poems previously published in de Vries’ first two English language collections—Dark Hour and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018 and 2021 respectively). These old works have been lightly revised for republication, and are paired with poems drawn from a manuscript-in-process to institute an autotelic kaleidoscope of some ten years worth of work in verse.
de Vries’ poems are spare, terse and epigrammatical—a barroom Bashō—dedicated to the glimmer of a compact glance; the chance, glamour and negative capability of a passing thought; and the slow drip of liquid crystal as colours our present. All My Dead Jesters is a torch song for our ‘poor subjectivity,’ a slow dance with sour times, a ‘[steering] away from [the] gratuitous provocation’ that litters our contemporary outlook. ‘Her competence as a poet lies in her ability to translate visceral vulnerability’ for the page (The Kellingrove Review / University of Glasgow), as she patchworks a heroic ‘poetry without [a] hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, [...] the map of a world we like to think we know’ (CA Conrad).
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Nike adjusting her sandal
My obliques hurt from fighting crime
but my shadow, she’s got no chill
doesn’t appreciate ‘beauty’
she, who gave one (1) star
to the waterpark, after slipping and falling
on the slick, wet tiles post-dip
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(NdeV, 2025)
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See here for a further word on this title.
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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a photograph taken by Giovanni Dall’Orto, ‘The Goddess Nike’ (Acroterion / Pentelic Marble), Museum of the Ancient Agora / Stoa of Attalos (Athens, Greece), © 2009.
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Nadia de Vries is a poet from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her previous collections include Know Thy Audience (MOIST, 2023), I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021) and Dark Hour (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). She also writes fiction in Dutch. Her novels De bakvis (Uitgeverij Pluim, 2022) and Overgave op commando (2025) were translated to English by Sarah Timmer Harvey as, respectively, Thistle (The New Menard Press, 2024) and Surrender on Demand (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).