Making the prince of clouds mine

Join us at Perdu for an evening of readings by Sharon Kivland and Alix Chauvet

Where Sharon Kivland’s Envois – a book cataloguing the love letters of Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland – is involved in what Daisy Lafarge calls ‘an erotic re-visioning of Lacan’s seminars, and of the epistolary form itself’, Alix Chauvet’s Cyclamen – a sequence of unfaithful translations, drawn from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal – ‘refuses’, according to Mia You, ‘fidelity in favour of flirtation’. This evening will give stage to two writing practices that invest in the liberties and winnings that a kind of feminist literary re-enactment might grant.

Chauvet’s debut, in which she is busy ‘making the prince of clouds mine’, shows her invested in creative approaches to translation. The book works between Baudelaire’s French and Englishes made both with and without him. In a like manner, Kivland’s Envois takes towards make-believe to write Jacques Lacan to herself, producing a new dynamic in so doing.

About the poets

Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, an editor and publisher. Her novel Abécédaire was published by Moist Books in 2022, and its counterpart, Almanach: A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar, was published by Grand Iota in 2025. A companion publication to Envois—entitled Her Discourse— was published by JOAN, 2025; a parallel work, These are addressed to you, was published by Bricks from the Kiln, 2025.

Alix Chauvet is a Swiss-French poet and graphic designer based in Amsterdam, taking pleasure in the possibilities of translation. She received her BA in graphic design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 2020, and has since been working independently and in collaboration with contemporary artists. Investigating the relationship between language and body, her hybrid practice covers a wide range of visual and linguistic experiments—from artist’s book design to experimental translation. Her method is rooted in slowing down the creative process through the use of analogue and unprofitable techniques such as cut-outs, letterpress, linocut, handwriting and painting. Her poetic approach follows the same logic, prioritising English over her mother tongue as a way to relate to language with both critical detachment and a degree of identification. Her poems appeared in literary magazines such as Blackbox Manifold. Cyclamen is Chauvet’s debut collection.

Dominic J. Jaeckle is an author, publisher and editor. Jaeckle runs & manages Tenement Press, and curated & collated the irregular magazine series Hotel (& its adjacent projects), 2016 to 2023. Jaeckle is at work on a series of “paper planes” under the banner John Cassavetes.