Nothing at All

Olivia Tapiero is a writer, translator and musician. She is the author Les murs (Robert-Cliche Award, Prix Senghor finalist), Espaces (2012), Chairs (2019), Phototaxie / Phototaxis (Nightboat Books, 2017 / 2021, Lambda Literary Awards finalist), and Rien du tout (2021, Grand Prix du livre de Montréal Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist). She is editor-in-chief for the literary magazine Moebius, and has contributed poems and essays to various publications in Canada, France, and Korea. She has also translated works of contemporary authors such as Roxane Gay, Anne Boyer and Billy-Ray Belcourt. She lives between Marseille and Montréal.

"Translated with a fierce precision by Kit Schluter, Olivia Tapiero’s Nothing at All is an urgent, visceral meditation on dissolution."—Anne Boyer, from the foreword"To read Nothing At All is to ignite one’s trypophobia, to expose oneself to truths that disgust and repel. And yet, the referred pain that reverberates through Tapiero’s prose-poetry also awakens relief and recognition—who among us doesn’t dream of caressing, if not dignifying, those parts of ourselves and our histories that have been silenced and disappeared?—Lilana Torpey, Asymptote"Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves."—rob mclennan"[Nothing at All] uses cosmic language (i.e. black holes, creatures from the sea) and speaks to global experiences of colonization and increased visibility and influence of fascism and yet, it is very much anchored in the body."—Bennett Malcomson, Periodicities“This cyclone of art, destruction, and nonconformity impresses."—Publishers Weekly, in praise of Phototaxis“[H]aunting lyricism, atmospherically rendered in Kit Schluter’s translation."—Jackie Wang, in praise of Phototaxis