All My Dead Jesters

Nadia de Vries

A suite of swans that cannot swim; a thatch of old works and new; of jokes that landed well, and others that sank; a paean to Nike as she refutes her name, and trades ‘Victory!’ as any connotation for the aura and atmosphere of neîkos / strife; fifty-two hands on a tired, analogue body.

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.