Notebooks, 1956-1978

Poetry. Translated from the French by Norma Cole. Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death.

"Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafés where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you."—Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the Postface

"She enunciates the words for desire and for loss of the other words with harrowing intensity...[and] explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."—Michael Palmer