A flurry of recent Legenda announcements continues with Daisy Sainsbury's new book Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics, due out in 2021 in our Research Monographs in French Studies series.

The extraordinary installation on the cover is a 1988 piece by the conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006), and we are very grateful to his Estate and Gallery for allowing us to use this image and for their kind assistance. Latham was a conceptual and performance artist whose variety of work defies any simple summary — he was a sculptor, a writer, a film-maker and even at one point a collaborator with Pink Floyd in their experimental art-rock days — but the image of the destroyed book recurs throughout his work.

This one is: "Distress of a Dictionary", glass fish tank containing torn books, electrodes and cables, 45.5 x 114.2 x 34 cm. The German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger once described an Old Master painting of the Apocalypse as "everything torn in half, except the canvas": but in a sculpture like Latham's, even the medium itself can be torn.


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