[Reading] Nadia De Vries, Sharon Kivland and Alix Chauvet

We are excited to invite you for an afternoon of readings and presentations of three newly released Yellow Jacket editions by Tenement Press: a new collection of poems by Nadia De Vries, a novel-in-correspondence with Lacan by Sharon Kivland and an unfaithful translation of Les Fleurs du Mal by Alix Chauvet. Come swoon! 💛

Schedule

17:00 - 18:30 Readings and presentations

About All My Dead Jesters by Nadia de Vries

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.

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, 2027). 

About Envois / The Complete Correspondence by Sharon Kivland

A novel-in-correspondence, a neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, an editor and publisher. Her novel Abécédaire was published by Moist Books in 2022, and its counterpart, Almanach: A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar, was published by Grand Iota in 2025. A companion publication to Envois—entitled Her Discourse— was published by JOAN, 2025; a parallel work, These are addressed to you, was published by Bricks from the Kiln, 2025. 

About Cyclamen by Alix Chauvet

A debut collection from the poet, artist and designer, a suite of unfaithful translations/transversions of works drawn from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, a bunch of flowers in decay, pressed and frayed, ‘a flock of pockmarked words.’

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue. — Mia You

Alix Chauvet is a Swiss-French poet and graphic designer based in Amsterdam, taking pleasure in the possibilities of translation. She received her BA in graphic design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 2020, and has since been working independently and in collaboration with contemporary artists. Investigating the relationship between language and body, her hybrid practice covers a wide range of visual and linguistic experiments—from artist’s book design to experimental translation. Her method is rooted in slowing down the creative process through the use of analogue and unprofitable techniques such as cut-outs, letterpress, linocut, handwriting and painting. Her poetic approach follows the same logic, prioritising English over her mother tongue as a way to relate to language with both critical detachment and a degree of identification. Her poems appeared in literary magazines such as Blackbox Manifold. Cyclamen is Chauvet's debut collection.