All My Dead Jesters

Author: Nadia de Vries

Artist: Guy Maddin

Publisher: Tenement Press (2026)

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.

De Vries’s 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. .

De Vries’s poetry is punctuated with especially commissioned collage-works by artist and filmmaker Guy Maddin.

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, 2027).

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.