CYCLAMEN by Alix Chauvet

Chauvet’s CYCLAMEN is a suite of poems riddled through Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen, a set of transversions & rewritings rooted in LES FLEURS DU MAL. A bunch of flowers in decay, pressed and frayed, a flock of pockmarked words.

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Through these creative translations of Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her flowers of evil line Amsterdam s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, & are tended by a distinctly feminist & nomadic sensibility. Alix Chauvet akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney & Lisa Robertson takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic & linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is der geheime Architekt der Moderne, & in Chauvet s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. [...] [W]hat CYCLAMEN ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue.

Mia You
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Nadia de Vries will be reading from her forthcoming title with Tenement (Spring 2026), a collection featuring new work as well as poems from her first two (now out of print) collections.