Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed

First Edition, 2022. 428 pages. Book measures 6.5 x 9.5 inches. Translated by Richard Sieburth.

This volume brings together Baudelaire’s late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate.
 
Baudelaire’s turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.

Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.