Nadia de Vries — Tenement Press

_{_{Giovanni Dall’Orto, The Goddess Nike
(Acroterion / Pentelic Marble),
Museum of the Ancient Agora / Stoa of Attalos
(Athens, Greece), © 2009.}}

_{All My Dead Jesters
Nadia de Vries

Tenement Press #24
978-1-917304-13-9
79pp [Approx.]

£16.50

_{PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE}

Published 5th March 2026

With collage works

by Guy Maddin

A thatch of old works and new;
of jokes that landed well, and others

that sank; a suite of swans that cannot

swim; a paean to Nike as she refutes her

name, and trades ‘Victory!’ as a leading

connotation for the aura and atmosphere

of νεῖκος / neîkos / strife; forty-nine hands

on a tired, analogue body.

All My Dead Jesters is an assembly of select poems previously published in de Vries’ first two English language collections—Dark Hour and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018 and 2021 respectively).
These old works have been lightly revised for republication, and are paired with poems drawn from a manuscript-in-process to institute an autotelic kaleidoscope of some ten years worth of work in verse.

^i.}

_{Sometimes I forget I am a target}

_{I watch Natalie Portman die on-screen
On-screen I watch Natalie Portman die

_{(NdeV, 2021)}

De Vries’ poems are spare, terse and epigrammatical—a barroom Bashō—dedicated to the glimmer of a compact glance; the chance, glamour and negative capability of a passing thought; and the slow drip of liquid crystal as colours our present. All My Dead Jesters is a torch song for our ‘poor subjectivity,’ a slow dance with sour times, a ‘[steering] away from [the] gratuitous provocation’ that litters our contemporary outlook. ‘Her competence as a poet lies in her ability to translate visceral vulnerability’ for the page (The Kelvingrove Review / University of Glasgow), as she patchworks a heroic ‘poetry without [a] hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, [...] the map of a world we like to think we know’ (CA Conrad).

^{SEE HERE FOR EXCERPTS ℅ HOTEL (circa 2020)}

^{De Vries, photographed by Zazie Stevens
in Vondelpark, Amsterdam, © 2025.}}
Readings

_{19:00 / 11.03.26

NEW CANONS : READINGS FROM

INNOVATIVE INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS

Jen Calleja
Jess Cole

Remi Graves

Will Harris

Juliet Jacques

frank r jagoe

Francesca Reece

Oisín Roberts

Rajasree Variyar

& Nadia de Vries

℅ Desperate Literature

& Brick Lane Bookshop

(22 Fictions)

Prototype Publishing

The Relegation Reader

Tenement Press

Monitor Books

Toothgrinder Press

Worms Magazine

& The Burley Fisher Community Press.

Hosted by Robert Loyko-Greer

& Kate Ellis.

The ICA

London, SW1Y 5AH} _{See here.}

_{18.30 / 03.10.25

Readings from Alix Chauvet’s Cyclamen

Alix Chauvet

& Nadia de Vries

San Serriffe

Sint Annenstraat

Amsterdam

See here.}

_^ii.

Verse & Chorus (2021)

_{A collaboration with Dominic J. Jaeckle, an exquisite corpse of an “I” played out in a multiplicity of voices, Verse & Chorus is an experimental act of collaborative reworking that quilts and collages cuts from two manuscripts (de Vries’ I Failed to Swoon and Jaeckle’s 36 Exposures) into an imagined third object and—in order of appearance—features readings from Nadia de Vries, Cíntia Gil, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Mark Lanegan, Stanley Schtinter, Becket Flannery, and Vilde Valerie Bjerke Torset, with an accompaniment of borrowed songs and original music from Matthew Shaw, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood.}

_{(See Spotify / See Apple Music.)}

_{Verse & Chorus was broadcast on Montez Press Radio (New York, NY), Resonance 104.4FM / Resonance Extra (London) and was included in the online / audio programme for the 2021 edition of the Rewire Festival (The Hague, Netherlands).}

^{_{i. / ii. / & iii. (Maddin, © 2025.)}

Praise for de Vries’ Dark Hour
& I Failed to Swoon (2018 / 2021)

With aphorism, deep pith and humour, Nadia de Vries delivers her sly lines and contrarian point of view with great force, making for an uncomfortable music.

Peter Gizzi

The minutiae of interpersonal frustrations occasion images of spiritual conflict, which are condensed into laconic, jewel-like poems, many not more than six or seven lines.

Jeffrey Grunthaner,

Hyperallergic

De Vries is a poet of barbed brevity, brutal idiom, figgety desire and delicious deadpan, like fresh white spit on a patent leather shoe. What can you do but hold up your fist of horns and believe her entirely?

Jack Underwood}

Nike adjusting her sandal

^{My obliques hurt from fighting crim

but my shadow, she’s got no chill

Doesn’t appreciate ‘beauty’

She, who gave one (1) star
to the waterpark, after slipping and falling

on the slick, wet tiles post-dip}

_︎^{_{(NdeV, 2025)}

Nadia de Vries’ debut collection [Dark Hour] opens with the standard disclaimers: These poems are a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Yet what arises from the author’s imagination is a world of reclaimed fairy tales, a ‘technological sublime,’ the fine arts rendered into the dark arts, and girlhood engineered as a contagion, insinuating itself into the sickly heart of the patriarchy to launch its fatal attack. Dark Hour is a countdown in verse, to that moment when the author’s imagination reveals itself as our new reality, and during which we learn to fine-cut poetry into pocketknives and poison. May your fears become abundant like girls.

Mia You

Dark Hour collects forty-five epigrammatical, elusive poems; while often pointed, pithy and direct, the voice speaks from a kind of torpor. It’s solitary, bereft, ingrown, prone to gothic moments (angels and vampires flit past the curtains)—as if a childhood fever was prolonged into adolescence, when desire made itself available through movie tropes. In this convalescent atmosphere, an exterior perspective is imagined, and out of her perceived weakness, the speaker manufactures an image of her
‘cuteness.’

Sam Riviere,

The Poetry Review}

^{Nadia de Vries is a poet from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her previous collections include Know Thy Audience (MOIST, 2023), I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021) and Dark Hour (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). She also writes fiction in Dutch. Her novels De bakvis (Uitgeverij Pluim, 2022) and Overgave op commando (2025) were translated to English by Sarah Timmer Harvey as, respectively, Thistle (The New Menard Press, 2024) and Surrender on Demand (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007) and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over seventy performances of his films around the world featuring live elements—such as orchestra, sound effects, singing and narration—most recently The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990) and The Heart of the World (2000) both won National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Experimental Film.}