Chris Tysh: Derrida’s In/Voice

“There is immense talent here—Chris Tysh just gets better and better. With multiple registers and citational energy, the archive is exploded and transformed: we find references to poetry, film, revolution, politics, and philosophy, all effortlessly braided and made dynamic as they speak to one another. With perfectly pitched music, and impeccable form, DERRIDA’S IN/VOICE discloses and complicates the knotted conversation between hard and soft power. It’s an awesome book.”—Peter Gizzi

“Chris Tysh’s ongoing project of ‘transcreations’ reminds us that the process of translating one language into another, like the transformation of prose into poetry, might be considered a kind of scandal. The brilliance and aplomb of this present volume, its mingling of theoretical and lyrical indiscretions, leave us transfixed once more by ‘modernity’s plunging neckline’ and by ‘the noose of an idiom or two.'”—Daniel Tiffany

“Poetry is, as it ever was, a bittersweet archeology. In Tysh’s DERRIDA’S IN/VOICE, there are no dead letters or desiccated leaves, but living fragments of thought, as layered and breathing as our histories.”—Vanessa Place

“Wonderfully quick and slippery, the voices here multiply, shooting out across continents and eras, covering so much ground while always keeping sound subtly in play. With hints of Derrida’s incisive love-letters in the background, Tysh writes her brainy, exacting, and wily missives across a kaleidoscopic culture that she’s woven from a huge range of resources—textual, cinematic, experiential… There’s great joy here—and defiance and rigor—exacting, demanding, and utterly fun.”—Cole Swensen

BlazeVOX [books] (August 2, 2020), 106pps, 8×10″, paperback, signed copies available.


Poet and playwright Chris Tysh is the author of several collections of poetry and drama, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kresge Foundation. Her latest projects include DERRIDA’S IN/VOICE (BlazeVOX books, 2020) and HOTEL DES ARCHIVES: A TRILOGY (Station Hill Press, 2018) which features verse “transcreations” from the French novels of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras. With Detroit filmmaker Oren Goldenberg, she has collaborated on a cine-poem, Alms of the Night. She teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit.

$ 16.00