![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/459d17359e1a6de6d6a3ac2ae01f0780ee430e65022ed673954cd45e69a189b0/KILLINGPLATO.jpg)
KILLING PLATO • Chantal Maillard
New Directions Poetry Pamphlet 25 / 68 pages / 2019
“I write / / to make the poisoned water / fit to drink.” ―Chantal Maillard
The two sequences of this book form a braided ars poetica: “Killing Plato” and “Writing.” The first is a numbered sequence of twenty-eight poems organized around an accident: a pedestrian has been hit by a truck and is dying in the middle of the road. Various characters appear―the philosopher Michel Serres, Robert Musil, a woman smoothing out her stocking, the truck driver, a boy on a balcony, the Spanish poet Jesús Aguado. At the bottom of the page another tale unfolds: a woman bumps into an old friend, a male poet who has written a book called Killing Plato about “a woman who has been knocked over by the force of a sound.” “Writing,” the second part, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on mortality and literary production.
︎ Condition note: New