Last Stop Before Insomnia / Dernier Arrêt Avant l’Insomnie,
​by Marlène Tissot, translated by Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier
Seraph Press Translation Series No. 3

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​​This taster of deliciously playful poetry by French poet Marlène Tissot takes you on a wild ride through the existential, the sensual and the sleep-deprived.
 
In her introduction to this small collection translator Anna Jackson says:
 
Some people write poetry more easily than they sleep. Marlène Tissot writes poetry even when she is writing prose, and observes the world with a poet’s focus on details, details that give rise to surprising associations and ideas … Marlène Tissot writes about chance encounters with people in the street, or people observed from a distance; about sleeplessness (a recurring theme); about feelings of emptiness, dispossession, anxiety, dread; about make-up, public transport, construction sites, film festivals, plastic bags; moving with astonishing speed and sleight of hand from one topic to another, often driven by associations between words, or through the combination of one saying with another, combining clichés or turns of phrase to come up with startling new combinations of images and ideas. The voice of her poetry is at once contemporary and original, personal (and personable) and somewhat strange (or estranged). I find her work tremendously exciting and I am looking forward to finding readers for it in New Zealand.  

Michael Schmidt, editor of PN Review, says of these translations: “the recurrent lines  spreading like an infection from poem to poem … re-inforce the sense that the poem is coming from  the space Eliot always said was where the imagination was most free and unpredictable, the gap between sleeping and waking, even if sleep never quite takes hold (does waking)?”

This gorgeous bilingual chapbook is hand-bound with hemp thread.

Read sample pages from this book (PDF 70 KB)
About the author

Marlène Tissot was born in the seventies, lives in the south of France, listens to lots of music, sleeps very badly, writes often at night, preferably in notebooks, has made up stories since she was ten-and-a-half years old (exactly), slips poetry in everywhere, gardens with tenderness, overcooks her jams, doesn’t much like talking, often plays with fire, hasn’t yet written her last word!​
About the translators

Anna Jackson lectures in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and has published six full collections of poetry as well as many academic books, articles, and edited collections. In 2016 she held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, where she met Geneviève Chevallier, and the chapbook Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon (Seraph Press, 2017) tells some stories, or collects some images, from that time. Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems will be published by Auckland University Press in 2018. 
 
Geneviève Chevallier is a senior lecturer in the English department at the University of Nice, where she teaches literature and translation. Her main fields of research are modern and contemporary theatre – and in particular that of Samuel Beckett, on which she has published several book chapters and articles – as well as translation, with a keen interest in challenging texts and the issue of translatability. She is currently working on the translation of Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology.

​Buy Last Stop Before Insomnia

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Title: Last stop before insomnia / Dernier arrêt avant l’insomnie​
Author: Marlène Tissot 
Translators: Anna Jackson and Geneviève Chevallier
Category: Poetry
ISBN: 978-0-9941345-8-5
Format: Paperback, 210 mm (tall) x 148 mm (wide), 40 pages
RRP:  $20
Publication Date:  October 2017
​
Trade price $10.67
Orders are ordinarily firm sale, but sale or return terms are available on request.
Contact Helen Rickerby, managing editor, Seraph Press, PO Box 25239, Wellington 6146, New Zealand
email: [email protected]
phone: (04) 385 7119

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Also by Anna Jackson

Dear Tombs, Dear Horizon by Anna Jackson
​In 2016, while the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France, Anna Jackson began recording some of her thoughts and impressions in a notebook.  Over the three months of her tenure this grew into a lively and charming poetic essay, which weaves her own experiences with her engagement with other writers and texts, including her predecessor Katherine Mansfield. More...

​Locating the Madonna, by Jenny Powell-Chalmers and Anna Jackson
Locating the Madonna is the outcome of an experiment in collaboration and poetic influence by poets at opposite ends of the country: Powell-Chalmers in Dunedin and Jackson in Auckland. More... ​