Charlotte den Broeck

After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020. Whereas those earlier books often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes, the key sequence of The Inside of a Stone concentrates on desert landscapes and womanhood – and the emotional resonance between the two – while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman’s wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen’s magical healing. From the reviews in Belgium and The Netherlands of The Inside of a Stone:‘In lines that are graceful yet urgent, Charlotte Van den Broeck reveals the wounds in landscapes, animals and people, women.’ – Trouw‘Charlotte Van den Broeck captures intense experiences in living language.’ – Trouw‘Charlotte Van den Broeck dismantles herself and the world.’ – Volkskrant‘With this collection, Charlotte Van den Broeck shows the limitations of the female image and breaks through them with her poems.’ – NRC

A spellbinding new talent explores the dark side of creativity through the stories of thirteen tragic architects 'Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence' Olivia Laing, Guardian In thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace. The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act.