Noémi Lefebvre

Translated by Sophie Lewis

Published 7 April 2021

‘I was trying not to think about looking for work, which is immoral, I wasn’t hoping to earn a living, which is pretty unusual, I couldn’t have cared less about the cash, which is reckless in these times of very grave threats, but I was scraping a living already, which was repugnant, on the miniscule royalties from a thickwit novel, which is scandalous, which I’d created from the stories of a brilliant and brittle grand dame of theatre, survivor of a romance full of stereotypes, which makes you think though I don’t know what about.’

Sparring with the spectre of an overbearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. Hence these ten ‘lessons to today’s young poets’ — a blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idle.

Read excerpts on Lithub and in Granta x
Noémi Lefebvre interviews herself for Hotel and Sophie Lewis discusses her translation of Poetics of Work in PEN Transmissions
See reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and more

‘A smart, timely, and novel proposal for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy.’ — Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up

‘Noémi Lefebvre's Poetics of Work is a bold amoral tantrum against the thorn in our psyche: the so-called luminary father-figure gaslighting our sense of personal and collective lyricism.’ — Yelena Moskovich, author of The Natashas and Virtuoso

‘A slice of anarchist perfection!’ — Mia Colleran on Twitter

By the same author: Blue Self-Portrait(2016)

105 pages
paperback, 180 x 120mm
isbn 978-1-8380141-3-1