To be content with "resembling nothing" deserves a long exercise in a rather inexact science. Namely, poetry. One must gather one's strength. For unity makes the farce, and Tristan Felix knows it. Completely naked beneath her masks, she becomes a clown but also a tragedienne. She electrifies the Electras she transports to Spain via Calvino's Nonexistent Knight, something Sancho never even considered. All the texts in this work are titled "Come Back!" For she who becomes our Pessoa by multiplying heterosexuals to the point of anonymity, like so many mimes, never ceases to astonish and delight us. I consider her the greatest of living, non-vain writers, and artists of the same pipe tobacco I have been smoking for over fifty years now. Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret >>>Details

This audacious work of fiction, Joguet, Joguette, in a collection aptly named "The Writer's Diagonal" (which allows invited authors to open their backstage and innermost selves to us), is a slope boldly descended into the depths of their human destitution by a brother and sister. Joguet and Joguette, without origin or descendants, an island detached from the vast continent of their inept species, form, as in a play, a Beckettian duo (for the prospect of a "Cape of the Worst"), a Rabelaisian duo (for the plunge into the very flesh of language), and a Boschian duo (for the infernal invention), a couple whose tragic exuberance is orchestrated more by the strength of the writing than by the characters' behavior – Tristan Felix >>>Details

Carole Mesrobian's writing is a journey into an imaginary realm that traces the line of an infinite expanse, plunging into the quicksand of life… where indifferent passersby trace their invisible stories… where writing gives its face to destiny, which strikes without heeding the groans of words… where a woman's cry plunges into the remnants of a writing to be rewritten and lived outside the deadly tunnel of otherness called man… “I am a woman elsewhere… where neither women nor men exist.” Davide Napoli. Carole Mesrobian inscribes her journey in a breathless book, as mixed as life itself; she skillfully blends the observations and effects of her intense inner life with her academic work. The study of epigraphs, vehicles of the profound thought of authors confronted with their texts (particularly those of Stendhal), naturally leads back to her personal approach. Philippe Thireau. Carole Mesrobian is a poet and doctoral candidate. She co-directs, with Marilyne Bertoncini, a major French online literary magazine: Recours au poème. >>>Details

“I don’t believe in chance, I only believe in encounters,” said René Char. Billie Holiday, Emily Dickinson, Malala Yusafzai are encounters. So, bringing together these three portraits of women I love and respect in a book is to reaffirm my attempts to no longer separate intimate desire from artistic development, to inscribe my path in what it reveals of twists and turns, of wanderings too, and to share it along an unexpected “diagonal.” And that’s perfectly fine. A raw diagonal, a sensitive bifurcation that offers me the possibility of bringing together some of my own fragments, of affirming an identity open to becoming, to movement—and therefore to the unforeseen, to the imaginary. >>>Details

A book by Dominique Preschez never arrives by chance; it requires fertile ground, a desire, a profound emotional state for the unthinkable to occur: for a masterful wave, carrying words and all the music of the world, to overwhelm our temporality, that of the reader whom Preschez invites into the discussion. As he writes, by dint of always being alive. Holding on, because death has always been visible. In search of the lost self following a stroke and clinical death in 1992, Dominique Preschez writes a collection of rediscoveries with the memory buried within that of others, precisely where the self might be found. Parlando naturally follows the monumental work of memory that is Le trille du diable, published by Tinbad in 2018. >>>Details

Pasolini, speaking of his work as a director and theorist, said he made a Cinema of Poetry. Following him, modestly but confidently, I maintain that I write a Poetry of Cinema (of – and not of). This poem serves as an image: Cinema poetry is a lament. This lament is absolute. That is to say, it has neither addressee nor foundation. The form of the lament is the broken heart. The particularity of this breaking is that the heart wills it. >>>Details

Who better than Alain Marc to embody this collection, "The Writer's Diagonal," dedicated to revealing the "making" of an author? To delve into "Acts of a Research," a notebook spanning 1986–2019, is to immerse oneself in the poet's fantastical, analytical, dreamy, and (literarily) criminal daily life: his notes, fragments, and selected pieces transgress the rules of writing, elevating intellectual outbursts to the status of works of art. Let no one be surprised by the occasional excessive use of commas; then the breath becomes labored, choppy, ideas thought firmly established flit joyfully from one punctuation mark to another, only to end in… a comma, perhaps, slipped in at the top or bottom of the page, as if to say: "This is where the truth lies, in this apostrophic stroke." "Listen to Alain Marc write," here, now. >>>Details

Murielle Compère-Demarcy painfully escapes herself to accompany "Saint Artaud" in his fragile, delirious, monstrous, sharp, and loving poetics. Artaud, an ethereal monument visible in the invisible. How to grasp the invisible? In *Alchemist of the Pulverized Sun*, the fifth volume of *The Writer's Diagonal*, Murielle Compère-Demarcy engages in an exercise of adoration and fascination: she embarks on a hallucinatory journey through the raw, profound, sometimes cerebral poetry, devastated by the stakes. But this poetry is masterfully established in the enveloping movement of this "canvas stretched on the easel of the soul"—a sublime verse of her own composition, which she dons to traverse the astonishing power of Artaud. >>>Details

To pose for Jacques Cauda in his painter's studio, and to die to reality. Geneviève, with her blue eyes—they are the epitome of the only true blue—is laid out, in a literary way, on the palette-stall, naked, exploded, cooked, devoured, before being reborn on the canvas and in the book. Every line and word of the work is a revelation-reconcealment: the painter's syntax, the murderer of light springing from the foundations, made of second thoughts, disrupts that of the writer. What is superfiguration, according to Husserl, quoted by Cauda? "The intended past can be superfigured, and the image produced, forming intuitively, is covered with what is intended." Thus, the act of creating, Art, can only be an approach to the elusive truth. >>>Details

A journey into the depths of time. Gilbert Bourson takes us by the hand and guides us through the labyrinth of his fertile thought. The poet is prolific, offering us a glimpse into his own excess, that of a royal childhood woven from all the turmoil of the past. What is poetry for Gilbert Bourson? "Language is energy. A poem is tension, a surge toward destabilizing what is correct and conventional; it is a permanent insurrection of meaning." Therefore, we should not be surprised by the syntactic delight that accompanies *Sur la rive où yâsse la ligne des portes* (On the Shore Where the Line of Doors Yawns). The revolution of words, of phrasing, adorns Gilbert Bourson's literary journey. >>>Details

This book contains the texts of two lectures given by Philippe Thireau. The first, entitled "The Dark Sound of Water," was given at the family farm in Flagey – Pôle Courbet, on July 30, 2017. It describes the author's approach to the photographs of Florence Daudé published in their joint work, *Sun Reflected in the Water* (Z4 éditions). The second lecture, entitled "Burning Flame," given at the Swiss Circle of Besançon at the invitation of the Association for the Defense of the French Language on March 15, 2016, examines the epistolary and romantic relationship between Benjamin Constant and Isabelle de Charrière at the end of the 18th century. This relationship is recounted in a book by the author published in 2015 by the Swiss publisher Cabédita under the title: *Benjamin Constant and Isabelle de Charrière, Hôtel de Chine and Outbuildings*. >>>Details