The Dice Cup

Author: Max Jacob

Translator: Ian Seed

Publisher: Wakefield Press (2022)

Max Jacob’s role in French modernity was essential, and with this second volume of his work from Wakefield Press, it can now be fully and properly assessed. First published in 1917, The Dice Cup stands alongside Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Pierre Reverdy’s Prose Poems as one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry. Jacob has been identified as a “cubist poet,” but this collection and its shifting style escape any such easy definition: dream accounts are rendered in playful prose that thumbs its nose at the fabular tradition of Baudelaire and Mallarmé and the Romantic disorder of Rimbaud, and subverts both poetic and narrative expectations in favor of dream logic, allusion, transformed autobiography and nonsensical parody. At once mystical and burlesque, the prose poems of The Dice Cup are consciously constructed, yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacob’s personality and our own.