Lavender Ink / Diálogos, paperback
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Publisher Marketing: Of Desire and Decarceration marks the first appearance in English not only of a selection of the young Belgian poet Charline Lambert’s writing, but indeed of her first four books in their entirety. The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four sequences of verse poems and poetic prose pieces respond to each other, grow out of each other. They are stages in an ongoing quest to grasp the mysteries of desire and gain insight into its innermost relationship, not only with the body, but also with language. Lambert’s intense writing leaves no doubts about its personal implications, but her quest can be generalized. For the poet, coming to terms with desire is a prerequisite for a human being who wishes to come to terms with him- or herself, with a personal “identity” that does not necessarily seem—feel—completely or satisfactorily “incarnated,” embodied. Whence this tetralogy, with its striking quips, koans, cryptic allusions (to crochet and Chinese acupuncture), queries, conjectures, lemmas, experimental results, and insightful observations about desire and “decarceration,” ever with the aim of clarifying our personal existential affairs so that “joy can be placed at the helm.”
