Les Matières de la nuit

Olivier Marboeuf takes us on a journey through myths, archives, and fables, where fire symbolizes Caribbean culture, colonial oppression, and ecological disasters, and where the echo of past revolts becomes the spark for future insurrections.

How to Live from Fire to Fire brings together two closely linked texts by Olivier Marboeuf. The volume opens with Marboeuf's latest work, How to Live from Fire to Fire, written as a new commission, and is followed by the first English translation of his earlier text The Night Just Before the Fire, originally published in French in 2025 by Atlantiques déchaînés.

Written as if in the same breath, the two texts follow one another in a fevered, relentless movement. In The Night Just Before the Fire, Marboeuf reworks Bernard-Marie Koltès's play La Nuit juste avant les forêts (Éditions de Minuit, 1977), transforming it into the delirious, unbroken monologue of a man with dark blue skin calling out to another man in the streets of a major European city. Through this act of rewriting, the echo of past revolts becomes the spark for future insurrections. Next time, a riot.

"The French believed that burning the king of the carnival would suffice to erase these old stories and impose a modicum of order in the beautiful Caribbean colony. They thought that everyone would return home and that the streets would take on their usual amnesiac calm after this necessary moment of release. At the end of the celebration, on Ash Wednesday, King Vaval would be burned and along with him, corruption, excess, and bad lives would burn too. But nothing was said about monopolies. Because even when residents returned home, exhausted by the festivities, even when the dark of night cloaked this whole little world and emptied its public squares, water continued to flow dark from taps and poison snaked a path into the land and its gardens. Somewhere, forests and cities continued to burn."
—Olivier Marboeuf

Olivier Marboeuf (born 1971) is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, he co-founded éditions Amok (now Frémok) publishing and launched the Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. He was artistic director of Espace Khiasma (2004–2018) which contributed to introducing postcolonial theories to the French art scene through numerous exhibitions and encounters

Translated from the French by Liz Duff Young.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Retour is a book featuring a collection of drawings made on train journeys between Belgium and the Netherlands. It combines hand-written typography and train interiors, subtly highlighting cultural differences forming the countries’ border. 

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.

—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell

Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. - Benjamin Krusling

Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.