Anna-Maria Celli
Born in Morocco, Anna-Maria Celli is a daughter of the Mediterranean, Spanish on her mother's side and Corsican on her father's. After studying philosophy, she devoted herself to writing. She has published several collections of poems, novels, plays, and short stories.
It is time to turn to thought. To approach the mystery by wiping away the sobs of the wild child, nestled within, held close to the heart. In Petals, Anna Maria Celli constructs a fervent poetics of torment, cruelty, and injustice. A poetry that does not look away, but traverses the night, the night of the flesh, of desire, of memory, and of loss. Through the sacredness of landscape, of the feminine, and of tales, this collection affirms that if we must die once more, it will be to better survive: by confronting, then vanquishing, the intimate monsters that haunt us. Nourished by an unquenchable hunger for self, this contemporary, deeply embodied writing makes the poem a place of struggle, vigilance, and rebirth. Eric Costan Publication: February 2, 2026 Order Press Release
For the two years he'd been seeing her, Annette had always been adorable and done her best to please him. Just like Annie, to be honest. Yet, he had a strange feeling. Because his mistress, sitting opposite him, was looking at him with an embarrassing intensity. "People's lives, animals' lives, from misunderstanding to frustration, from mix-up to daydream, from the disease of stupidity to desperate remedies, Léon, Annie, Annette, Maurice, René, Jacky… the protagonists of Anna Maria Celli's short stories draw us into the traps hidden within ordinary lives. Inexorably, a mechanism as petty as it is diabolical transforms characters who struggle, and who resemble us a little… into grotesque, sometimes moving puppets… In vain. Publication: February 1, 2023 Order
In Greek mythology, nymphs protected themselves from prying eyes by covering their nakedness with peonies. Flowers of modesty and shame, they were believed to possess the power to heal all kinds of ailments, both physical and spiritual, and are still used in traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine. Their blooming, accompanied in Antiquity by formidable magical rituals, lends its title to Anna Maria Celli's surprising collection, in which she brilliantly renews her poetic art. These sequences of tercets, with the exception of a handful of quatrains and a single couplet, evoke mists of words seeking to recapture the echo of a lost, forgotten voice. Or islets of foam on the sand of a beach. Or even graffiti etched with a razor on a blank wall that immediately captures the eye. Sentences, riddle-like images, pirouettes of meaning, mysterious asides, and unexpected conclusions. And then, four times, a long dialogue interrupts them, a merciless, explosive exchange of questions and answers between a man and a woman. Is she the woman of the man's life with whom she is confronting him? Their conversations, which begin in a rainy setting reminiscent of a pre-war black-and-white bar, are as full of enigmas as the haikus-like phrases that surround them. They are breathless flashes, where close-ups of screams, like those in Munch's paintings, tear through the intimate fabric of the screen. Are they losing themselves, or are they reenacting the dialogue of a forgotten past, as in Verlaine's poem? The irruption of these scenes adds to the drama that one senses unfolding throughout these pages, that of a disappearance irrevocably linked to the crimson bloom of peonies. Pierre Lepère Publication: April 15, 2021 Order
