Nicolas Pesquès

Nicolas Pesquès, born in 1946, began writing in 1971. In 1980 he embarked upon La face nord de Juliau, a poem comprising 18 volumes as of 2023, published between André Dimanche and Flammarion. This involves writing a hill and questioning this activity: what language does to things, to bodies, and how the body responds in writing, in reading. Neither finished nor finishable, this poem questions its progress as much as its subject. Pesquès has also written texts on art, most of which are collected in Sans peinture (L’Atelier Contemporain, 2017), and essays on the poetry of Jacques Dupin.

Pesquès’s works, beyond La face nord de Juliau, include Incarnation le simple (Éditions du limon,1991), L’Intégrale des chemins (André Dimanche, 1993), Balises pour Jacques Dupin (Éditions Fourbis,1994), Trois poèmes (Éditions du limon,1995), Non-stop (Jan Voss) (André Dimanche, 2004), L’atelier du sculpteur (with Dominique Evrard, Bentelli, 2007), Sans Peinture (L’Atelier Contemporain, 2017) and Chères images, Ecriture et peinture chez Gilles Aillaud (L’Atelier Contemporain, 2023)

Pesquès and his wife Maïtrei have translated into French works by Cole Swensen, Claudia Rankine, Lorine Niedecker, Lyn Hejinian, Ann Lauterbach and Carol Snow. Translations of material from volumes 5 and 6 of La face nord de Juliau have been translated by Cole Swensen as Physis (Parlor, 2007), Juliology (Counterpath, 2008) and Overyellow (Parlor, 2016).