Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert and translated by John Taylor

This is poetry from Belgium.

Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert translated by John Taylor is published by Dialogos. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2024.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781956921335E12.

Of Desire and Decarceration, by Charline Lambert and translated by John Taylor, has a title that brings intimacy and freedom into the same breath. Desire is usually imagined as private, but decarceration is public, structural, bodily, legal, and psychic. That pairing gives the collection its charge. This Belgian French-language book seems interested in release not as vague liberation but as something felt through the body’s constraints, habits, and hungers. I would read it for the friction between lyric inwardness and the language of enclosure. Taylor’s translation likely preserves Lambert’s precision while allowing the poems room to breathe. The book sounds like a study of what wants out: from the cell, from the self, from inherited forms of obedience.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.