The Dice Cup - by Max Jacob (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The most important prose-poem collection of the 20th century, available in a trade publication for the first time

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 Dice Cup are consciously constructed, yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacob's personality and our own.
Max Jacob (1876-1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with Apollinaire and Modigliani and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.

Review Quotes

The appeal of Jacob's prose poems is in their universality and agile unpretentiousness of delightfully bizarre fables and foibles, parodies and pastiche, the outrageous and the innocuous, the prophetic and the fated.--Pat Nolan "The New Black Bart Poetry Society"

The translation does an admirable job... I'd never read 'The Dice Cup' before starting this review but was steadily won over by its lovable quirkiness, intellectual heft, and curious humility. I also became persuaded of its importance within a location and period surely unignorable and enthralling to anyone interested in modernism.--Guy Russell "Tears in the Fence"

There is much to be enjoyed and loved in this book by readers who understand the importance, and pleasures, of being teased and confounded.--Jeremy Over "PN Review"

These new translations of two of Jacob's major collections should be recognized as welcome and essential.--Patrick James Dunagan "Rain Taxi"

This choice of an absolutely contemporary vocabulary manages to retain the freshness in phrasing of Jacob's poems; Seed can allow himself to have fun, for his style is situated exemplarily in a universe which rightly wins over the unreserved complicity of the reader. [...] In short, one discovers here, with pure joy and genuine amazement, the look, by turns malicious, anguished or disoriented, of Max Jacob...--Alexander Dickow "Les Cahiers Max Jacob"