The Vitals. Marie de Quatrebarbes. Trans. Aiden Farrell. World Poetry, 2024. 144 Pages.

In a clinical setting, the taking of vitals entails a body arranged atop a paper-covered surface unaccustomed to its shape. A cuff tightens around a bicep. Somewhere there is Velcro, the sound of becoming unfastened. In this moment, the pulse is not a private thing but an audible, public one—typically hidden sequences pressed to the surface, momentarily registered, and recorded. In this sense, the taking of vitals becomes an attempt to render the body legible through its stutters and would-be-stops.

The Vitals (Les vivres), written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, attempts not to render any particular body, experience, or sensation legible but rather seems concerned with charting the kinds of movements that such rendering entails. In a series of diaristic prose poems spanning five successive months, from July to December, de Quatrebarbes records temporary “surfacings”—and, in the process, begins to register grief’s momentary yet recurrent exposure, as well as those small physiological and linguistic fluctuations that accompany loss and sorrow. Throughout, The Vitals ultimately appears less interested in diagnosing “xyz” as “grief” and more interested in charting the conditions under which sensation (such as grief) becomes record.

Images which “pulse” abound, culminating in glottal-stop-like lists reminiscent of Joan Didion’s similarly elegiac The Year of Magical Thinking or Vanessa Onwuemezi’s surreal Dark Neighbourhood. During the month of July, de Quatrebarbes’ speaker notes how: “The lights flickered,” on and off; “Eyelashes bat,” up and down; and for every “recess of which an eye knows a thing or two,” a dilation appears, there it is now, approaching on the horizon. By August, the collections’ pulses intensify, become “spasms in a forest of forms.” And even amid more playful, grotesque “image[s] of corkscrewed socks,” there remains a constant spiraling out (and a spiraling right back in) akin to DNA’s double helix, oscillating the reader between fleeting recognition and jarring estrangement.

As the collection moves into early autumn, tension arises for the speaker when attempting to reconcile or situate the individual within a collective. An entry from September 6th—in a string of sentences shifting between “I” and “we,” singular and plural—emphasizes the difficulty (impossibility?) of enmeshing the two:

    Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My      window turned the world into a thin surface      and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m          covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My          mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We          find time in the same place we left it—in          the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the            library burned down and the books were          devoured by flames. Say again: do mourners      have a singular?

Here, as throughout de Quatrebarbes’ English debut, a spasm is never singular; it culminates both in whip and lash, in pain and its afterimage, in presence and absence. While reading, I often thought of Sartre’s notion of negation—the way consciousness asserts itself by naming what is not. If the “body is that of previous states,” as de Quatrebarbes observes, then the body is also that which it has not been previously but that it very well may become: “We’ll busy ourselves with the skeleton, little one.”

Tension arises, too, between articulation and elision. In the latter half of The Vitals, linguistic markers of omission—abbreviations, parentheticals, ellipses—increasingly appear, gesturing toward what might have been said, or what resists full disclosure. At times, these markers appear to be a protective mechanism for the grieving speaker: “believing that perhaps the protective layer of wool arrived—plunge of green and the fruit’s pit. Can it be that he, himself, is abs. ext. air?” Other times, the way de Quatrebarbes’ truncates the speaker’s pain feels authentic to how suffering becomes narrated, in real life, to protect (or at the unsaid behest of) others. What must be softened or omitted entirely so that the listener—the nurse taking vitals—does not flinch? Sorry my heart is racing, sorry my BPM is so high, sorry I chugged a Red Bull in the parking lot, I only did it because…These are things I have quite literally said to a health care professional while lying exposed on a table—but “Never mind, an abs. held for:” Is this what language looks like when attempting to protect oneself in the throes of grief, or when crafting one’s distress to be more palatable? Though the collection does not shy away from considering the topic of anguish, it does so indirectly, reflecting and interrogating social niceties rather than sobbing outright: “If I think of the tears that followed the breaks and crashes: how to know when it’s one’s turn to cry?”

The act of withholding becomes emphasized by the temporal gaps—lacunae in time marked by skipped days and corresponding entries—within the collection’s journal framework itself. The resulting portrayal is one of grief’s disjointedness. As Farrell notes in the Translator’s Afterword: “To sketch the experience of grief, de Quatrebarbes’s text embodies the task of bearing—bearing weight, bearing loss in the passage of time. What emerges is a coming to awareness of the slow and absurd labor of being someone without the other.” Indeed, just as a speaker decides to withhold, the text similarly omits stretches of lived time, leaving the reader to inhabit spaces of absence and briefly taste discontinuity. Though an abundance of white space is not used to force such an inhabitance, doing so might have bolstered this rendering even further.

Tangled up with The Vitals’ charting of grief, and its many pulsations, is the speaker’s desire to locate the flatline between each beat. On September 3rd, the titular poem wrestles with the paradoxical fact that life continues amid and after death—and, further, that death births its own (after)images: “What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow […] loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.” These shifting portraits, much like de Quatrebarbes’ earlier lists, suggest an anatomy, a landscape, an experience (?) in continuous transformation. The following entry reaches toward cessation: “Flat mouth (option to withdraw).” Here, the “frozen function of a use” suggests a body tempted by stasis. Yet, no true flatline materializes. This moment arrives mid-collection, without formal or structural stillness, perhaps implying that what feels like an ending within grief is often only another low—one mistaken for finality…until the next low arrives. “Eyes (punctuations): they fail me,” the speaker concedes several September entries later, acknowledging that for the grieving there is no desired terminus, only the endurance of an ongoing pulse.

The inability to locate a flatline coincides with the speaker’s difficulty in pinning down a body/sensation at any particular moment in time, a friction that undercurrents the collection’s more inward-facing confessions. Lines such as “This face was mine” [emphasis mine] are particularly revealing: linguistically, the present “this face” arrives first, even as the verb situates it in the past; phenomenologically, we experience our present selves before reflecting on them; and chronologically, of course, the past precedes the present. This line, and others, thus enact a temporal slippage, allowing the present to appear first on the page even as it is grammatically framed as past—an ironic yet fitting gesture for a collection attempting to measure the constant instability of a grieving self.

And so, The Vitals asks readers to linger in these tensions, to attend to the seams where words hesitate, stutter, stretch the mouth, or are scrubbed from the tongue altogether. “What is eaten: the vitals,” de Quatrebarbes’ speaker tells us, but this assertion (like much of the collection) is indeterminate, un/clear, and skips (quite fittingly, might I add) over the very sensation it seeks to measure. Eat, yes—but do not swallow, please hold. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Resist the impulse to digest even as your reliance on language insists on constructing non/sense and meaning.

If the taking of vitals in a clinical setting entails a body arranged atop a paper-covered surface unaccustomed to its shape, then this collection’s attempt at measuring such a taking entails fracturing a body of language across the page, compelling readers to become more attentive to these unaccustomed forms. Just as a cuff tightens around a bicep, words here are used to exert pressure. Somewhere: an elision; an abbrev.; a gesture at a gesture of something withheld;               ; the sound meaning makes when unfastened? In documenting grief’s markers, de Quatrebarbes reminds us that to register a pulse is to confirm existence but also to witness its inevitable trajectory toward non-aliveness. In The Vitals, pulsating fragments briefly render grief audible—pressed to the surface, and then momentarily registered, and then held, held.