Join us on Sunday the 26th of February for a reading by Nadia de Vries of her most recent poetry collection Know Thy Audience, published by moist books in 2022. 

Know Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries’ third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor – but not poetry altogether.

Speaking—or rather, singing—as a ‘battered woman’ from a corner of hell, De Vries’ aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the author—and not her perpetrator—pulls the strings. Who is the victim in these poems? Can violence be redeemed through esthetic metamorphosis? Or can powerlessness only be transferred as fetish? Know Thy Audience investigates the extent to which a victim can share their wounds, and to what degree an audience can—sensibly, ethically—be burdened with painful knowledge.

"Menace turned inside out! 'When I die I want to come back as a piercing sound / In the ear of every rapist'. Here is the poetry without the hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, but you know this book is brilliant, and you know you will live with these poems for the rest of your life once you have read them. I am a huge fan of Nadia de Vries, a poet wrangling suffering bodies on the map of a world we like to think we know, offering us no easy answers.” — CAConrad

Find the book here
https://www.rile.space/books/know-thy-audience

About Nadia de Vries
Nadia de Vries is a poet and cultural scholar from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She previously wrote the collections Dark Hour (2018) and I Failed to Swoon (2021), both published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies, and has been translated to Latvian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian. In 2020, she defended her PhD in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. A section of her thesis, on the online circulation of images of dead human bodies, was published by MIT in the summer of 2022. In addition to her poetry and scholarship, De Vries also writes fiction and criticism in Dutch. Her debut novel De bakvis (2022) and essay collection Kleinzeer (2019) were published by Uitgeverij Pluim. She was a resident at Passa Porta in Brussels in the spring of 2022, and her writing has been generously supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature since 2020.