Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for 55 years, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Todesfuge / Deathfugue Pierre Joris & Paul Celan (Small Orange Import, 2024), Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020, his two final volumes of Paul Celan translations came out: Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG) & Microliths They are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose (CMP). In 2019, Spuyten Duyvil published Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi literature). Other recent works include A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh & J. Newberger, CMP, 2020), earlier: Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018) & The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Simoncini 2017). He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, pluridisciplinary artist Nicole Peyrafitte.

The duet, lush with resonance and reference, has become a beautiful habit for Pierre Joris. His interviews let you see so far outside that coming around again, but off, is easy. The resulting spiral is a new curriculum and in this “riot of air” it’s almost like we know all that he knows. — Fred Moten